PRIMARY STRATIFIED ROCKS. 53 



It may be said we have no right to deny the possible 

 existence of life and organization upon the surface, or in the 

 interior of our planet, under a state of igneous fusion. 

 " Who," says the ingenious and speculative Tucker, (Light 

 of Nature, book iii. chap. 10,) " can reckon up all the varie- 

 ties that infinite wisdom can contrive, or show the impossi- 

 bility of organizations dissimilar to any within our experi- 

 ence? Who knows what cavities lie within the earth, or 

 what living creatures they may contain, endued with senses 

 unknown to us, to whom the streams of magnetism may 

 serve instead of light, and those of electricity affect them as 

 sensibly as sounds and odours affect us ? Why should we 

 pronounce it impossible that there should be bodies formed 

 to endure the burning sun, to whom fire may be the natural 

 element, whose bones and muscles are composed of fixed 

 earth, their blood and juices of molten metals ? Or others 

 made to live in the frozen regions of Saturn, having their 

 circulation carried on by fluids more subtle than the highest 

 rectified spirits raised by chemistry?" 



It is not for us to meet questions of this kind by dogma- 

 tizing as to possible existences, or to presume to speculate- 

 on the bounds which creative Power may have been pleased 

 to impose on its own operations. We can only assert^ that 

 as the laws that now regulate the movements and properties 

 of all the material elements, can be shown to have under- 

 gone no change since matter was first created upon our 

 planet ; no forms of organization such as now exist, or such 

 as Geology shows to have existed, during any stages of the 

 gradual formation of the earth, could hav^e supported, for an 

 instant, the state of fusion here supposed. 



We therefore conclude, that whatever beings of wholly 



the earlier deposites of sand into compact quartz rock, and beds of clay into 

 c'ay slate, or other forms of primary slate. Tbe reck which some authors have 

 called primary grauwacke, seems to be a mechanical deposite of coarse 

 sandstone, in which the form of the fragments has not been so entirely 

 obliterated by heat, as in tlie case of compact quartz rock. 



5* 



