116 Geological Society of London. 
creation of organic beings. — If it was reasonable that Hutton should 
in his time call in question the validity of such a doctrine, whether 
founded on the absence of organic remains m strata called primary or 
in granite, still more are we bound, after the numerous facts brought 
to light by modern geology, to regard the opinion as more than ques- 
tionable. I[ observe with pleasure that Dr. Buckland broadly as- 
sumes what I have elsewhere termed the metamorphic theory, having © 
stated in his 6th chapter that beds of mud, sand, and gravel, depos- 
ited at the bottom of ancient seas, have been converted by heat and_ 
other subterranean causes into gneiss, mica slate, hornblende slate, 
clay slate, and other crystallme schists., But if this transmutation - - 
be assumed, it must also be admitted that the obliteration of the or- 
ganic remains, if present, would naturally have accompanied so en- 
tire a change in mineral structure. The absence, then, of organic 
fossils in crystalline stratified rocks, of whatever age, affords no pre- 
sumption in favor of the non-existence of animals and plants at re- 
mote periods. BE 
The author, however, in another part of his Treatise contends, 
that even if the strata called primary once contained organic re- 
mains, there is still evidence in the fundamental granite of an ante- 
cedent universal state of fusion, and consequently a period when the 
existence of the organic world, such as it is known to us, was im- 
possible. ‘There'was, he says, one universal mass of incandescent 
elements, forming the entire substance of the primeval globe, wholly 
incompatible with any condition of life which can be shown to have 
ever existed on the earth.* Believing as I do in the igneous origin 
of granite, I would still ask, what proof have we in the earth’s crust 
of a state of total and simultaneous liquefaction either of the gra-_ 
nitic or other rocks, commonly called plutonic? All our evidence, 
on the contrary, tends to show that the formation of granite, like the 
deposition of the stratified rocks, has been successive, and that dif- 
ferent portions of granite have been in a melted state at distinct and 
often distant periods. One mass was solid, and had been fractured 
before another body of granitic matter was injected into it, or through 
it in the form of veins. In short, the universal fluidity of the crys- 
talline foundations of the earth’s crust can only be understood in the 
same sense as the universality of the ancient ocean. All the land 
has been under water, but not all at one time; so all the subterra- 
nean unstratified rocks to which man can obtain access have been 
melted, but not simultaneously. 
* Bucekland’s Bridgewater Treatise, vol. 1. p. 55. 
