hunter's posthumous paper on fossils. 307 



loam, and peat. These are found, and at considerable depth, retaining 

 most of their original composition ; and we find wood, bones of land- 

 animals, as also shells of sea-animals, even in the same bed, encrusted ; 

 each of which I shall consider. 



" The vegetable and land-animal substance show that the sea has 

 overflowed the land, and that it has afterwards left it, so as a second 

 time to be land again ; for it is on what is now land that all those 

 fossils are found which must have been formerly covered with water ; 

 but previous to that it must have been land, which last is not abso- 

 lutely necessary where only sea-productions are found." — P. v. 



" They show the accretion, crystallization, precipitation, and subsiding 

 of solid matter, or of all the different earths, both common and metallic, 

 in all their different ways, which must have been either mixed or sus- 

 pended in solution in the water prior to those formations we now find ; 

 they show the vast time the sea must have been in some places, to give 

 us such depths of new accreted matter. 



" Perhaps the depth in the earth of extraneous fossils might give us 

 the quantity of depth of earth of native fossils, formed at any one time 

 of the residence of the sea in the same place ; . . . also, as the fossils now 

 found in countries whose climate does not correspond with the climates 

 now inhabited by the recent (which implies that the fossils can be 

 matched by the recent), we are led to suppose that there has been an 

 alteration in the ecliptic ; and they also give us a hint what vegetables 

 and animals are probably lost, or are not now found. The first of these, 

 viz. the fossil not being readily matched, when fully settled, will in 

 some degree explain the second. 



" Not only the formation, or rather the mode of preservation, of wood 

 and animal [fossils] is shown by their intermixture with the native, but 

 the formation of native fossils is also shown by the vast variety of parts of 

 sea-animals being found encased in them, and of all kinds of earths, 

 viz. calcareous earth, flint, crystals, clay, sand, metals (as we often find 

 iron and the pyrites joined with the extraneous fossil), and in all states 

 of those earths, viz. some in powder, as chalk ; wet powder, as clay ; 

 others crystallized, as flint, sand ; calcareous earth, as marble, spar, 

 <fec. : but I have observed that we do not find extraneous fossils in 

 granite, and yet we have no reason for supposing that the formation of 

 granite is different from any of the others. 



" The great depth and quantity of those extraneous fossils show that 

 the sea must have been a considerable time there ; however, the history 

 of countries has shown this, without having recourse to collateral cir- 

 cumstances to prove it ; for no extraneous fossils now found are within 

 the period of history, not even those bones of land-animals found in 



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