574 THE UNIVERSE. 



do not find among them any trace of organized beings, bi;t 

 by way of compensation tliey contain the principal riches 

 which Nature elaborates in the splendid laboratories of 

 her alchemy. 



Metalliferous layers often lie in veins, huge cracks 

 in the globe filled with divers materials. Philosophers 

 guided only by the power of intuition — Descartes and 



273. First Gi'anite Beds and First Ui^iieavals. 



Leibnitz — had taken up perfectly correct ideas as to the 

 theory of their formation. They considered that the ores 

 and other substances met with in the rocks had filled up 

 the clefts by solidifying there, having escaped in a state 

 of vapour from the burning beds below. Werner demon- 

 strated this in a very plausible way, and modern geologists 

 have accepted his views, at the same time modifying them 

 a little. 



In his beautiful work La Vie Souterraine, M. Simonin 

 maintains that these metallic emanations may reach the 

 fissures in two ways. " They are deposited in the fissures 

 Avhich constitute the veins either in the state of vapour by 



