62 THEORY OF THE EARTH. 



tablishecl limits of physical and chemical science, 

 there still remain much diversity and contradiction, 



According to one of these writers, every thing 

 has been successively precipitated and deposited, 

 nearly as it exists at present ; but the sea, which 

 covered all, has gradually retired.* 



Another conceives, that the materials of the 

 mountains are incessantly wasted and floated down 

 by the rivers, and carried to the bottom of the 

 ocean, to be there heated under an enormous pres- 

 sure, and to form strata which shall be violently 

 lifted up at some future period, by the heat that now 

 consolidates and hardens them.f 



A third supposes the fluid materials of the globe 

 to have been divided among a multitude of succes- 

 sive lakes, placed like the benches of an amphi- 

 theatre ; which, after having deposited our shelly 

 strata, have successively broken their dikes, to 

 descend and fill the basin of the ocean. J 

 , i </) f:.-;',v-- /\'i t $'l\3$$& :-*H> " tipjN - ; '' . 



According to a fourth, tides of seven or eight 

 hundred fathoms have carried off from time to 



* In his Geology, Delematherie assumes crystallization as the chief 

 cause or agent. 



t Button, and Playfair in his Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of 

 the Earth. Edirib. 1802. 



t See Lamanon, in various parts of the Journal de Physique. 



