hunter's posthumous paper on fossils. 309 



So also Hunter writes : "It would appear that the sea has more 

 than once made its incursions in the same place." 



The proofs of such repeated uprisings and submersions of parts of 

 the earth are now abundant and unequivocal. 



There is no geologist, no observer with a mind capable of appre- 

 ciating and interpreting the evidences of the dynamics that have affected 

 the earth's crust, but admits that the entire surface of the earth has 

 been beneath the sea, but not necessarily at one and the same time ; 

 that the alternations of land and sea have in many places occurred 

 more than once ; and that " vast periods of time" have elapsed in the 

 course of these changes and operations. 



With regard to the alterations of climate which Hunter deduced 

 from the supposed identification of some of his fossils with those of 

 recent animals, he was induced to refer the circumstance to " a change 

 in the situation of this globe respecting the sun," in other word,-;, to a 

 " change in the ecliptic." Here he departs from his principle of ex- 

 plaining the past phenomena by present causes. Newton long since 

 declared, in reference to a similar supposition borrowed by Burnet from 

 an Italian author, " Allessandro degli Allessandri," in the beginning of 

 the eighteenth century, that " there was every presumption in astro- 

 nomy against any former change in the inclination of the earth's axis ;" 

 and Laplace has since strengthened the arguments of Newton, against 

 the probability of any former revolution of this kind. 



It may be a question, however, whether the mental stock now to be 

 dealt with by the geologist does not yield a truer appreciation of the 

 duration of time in which the movements of the stellar and solar 

 systems have gone on, than could be afforded by the observations and 

 calculations of the astronomer in the times of Newton and Laplace : 

 whether the inadequacy of the analogy, based by Cuvier on the know- 

 ledge of the characters of a species during a period of 3000 years, 

 of such seeming fixity of specific characters, to the effects of influences 

 on generations succeeding each other during 300,000 years, may not be 

 applicable to the case of Newton, considering the results of his observa- 

 tions and calculations under a preoccupation of the mind by the theo- 

 logical age of the world. 



Hunter's recourse to ' a change in the ecliptic,' as well as to " some 

 attractive external principle producing a great and permanent tide," sxich 

 as Whiston's comet, e. g., was, however, the consequence of a mis- 

 conception or misinterpretation of the phenomena which those hypo- 

 thetical causes were invoked to explain. 



Hunter believed, for example, that the elephants' remains found in 

 northern and temperate latitudes belonged to the same species, or at 



