428 ON THE UNIVERSAL DELUGE. 



destroy the sinful world with fire or water, and at length 

 decided for water *, may not be so justly considered the 

 author of these appearances, as Saturn, who devoured his 

 children. Or, to be less metaphorical in our language, it 

 may perhaps have been with the origin of conglomerates, 

 as it is in our own day with the origin of fragments of rock 

 and boulders, in which the rock being fractured in various 

 places by the alternations of heat and cold, by the influ- 

 ence of air and atmospheric water, falls into pieces of 

 greater or smaller magnitude, which are carried forward 

 by the water, and gradually rounded in their progress, 

 so that they assume a more perfectly globular shape the 

 farther they are removed from their original situation. 

 Therefore, as regards the foregoing enquiry, it is not an 

 unimportant circumstance, that the long but continual 

 rolling of the boulders during their rounding, appears to 

 be much more efficacious than a rapid and violent im- 

 petus, and that, in this case, as in many other geognostic 

 appearances, time rather than force is to be taken into 

 account. Another circumstance, perhaps, corresponds 

 with this, that the change produced by the weather, not 

 only by the first disunion, but also by the progressive 

 disintegration of the rocks, by the blunting of the edges 

 and corners, by the diminution of the fragments, and 

 generally in the origin of the boulders and fragments of 

 rocks of every description, has just as much influence as 



* " Jamque eral in tolas sparsurus fulmina terras, 

 4 Tela reponuntur, manibus fabricata Cyclopum : 

 " Poena placet diversa ; genus mortale sub undis 

 " Perdere, et ex omni nimbos dimittere coelo." 

 1 OVID. Met. lib. i. v. 255. 



