n 



5" 



o 



MAESILLI 



[Oh. III. 



■ 



but have given a faithful abridgment of the entire treatise 



More 



adopted, with all its faults and excellences. The reader will 

 therefore remark, that although this admirable essay em- 



prmc 



w eological 

 research, it makes no allusion to the extinction of certain 



classes of animals ; and it is evident that no opinions on this 



time, grained a firm 



That 



Lister and other English naturalists should long before have 

 declared in favour of the loss of species, while Scilla and most 

 of his countrymen hesitated, was perhaps natural, since the 

 Italian museums were filled with fossil shells belonging to 

 species of which a great portion did actually exist in the 

 Mediterranean ; whereas the English collectors could obtain 



from 



explored. 



Moro's system consisted in deriving 



all the stratified rocks from volcanic ejections ; an absurdity 

 which his opponents took care to expose, especially Vito 



Amid.* Moro 



seems 



misled 



desire to represent the formation of secondary rocks as having 



extremely 



while at the same time 



may 



he wished to employ known agents in nature. To imagine 

 torrents, rivers, currents, partial floods, and all the operations 

 of moving water, to have gone on exerting an energy many 

 thousand times greater than at present, would have appeared 

 preposterous and incredible, and would have required a 

 hundred violent hypotheses ; but we are so unacquainted 

 with the true sources of subterranean disturbances, that their 



in theory be multiplied indefinitely, 

 without its being possible to prove the same manifest con- 

 tradiction or absurdity in the conjecture. For this reason, 

 perhaps, Moro preferred to derive the materials of the strata 

 from volcanic ejections, rather than from transportation by 

 running water. 



Marsilli. — Marsilli, whose work is alluded to by Generelli, 

 had been prompted to institute enquiries into the bed of the 

 Adriatic, by discovering, in the territory of Parma, (what 



* Sui Testacei della Sicilia. 



