hunter's posthumous paper on fossils. 323 



That inundation, he observed, was too transient, it consisted principally 

 of fluviatile waters ; and if it had transported shells to great distances, 

 must have strewed them over the surface, not buried them at vast 

 depths in the interior of mountains. The close similarity, in the clear 

 and philosophical views and words of Fracastoro, to those of Hunter 

 (who we may safely believe had never read, or probably heard of the 

 Italian author), are very striking. I need not trespass on your time by 

 recounting the hundredfold additional and diversified testimony, which 

 God, in his wisdom, has suffered to be made manifest, and to be irre- 

 sistible in producing conviction according to the means of appreciating 

 truth with which He has been pleased to endow the human under- 

 standing, in demonstrating the utter inadequacy of any of the brief and 

 transient traditional deluges to account for observed geological and 

 palasontological phenomena. 



As the astronomer in teaching his science gives the results of the 

 exercise of those faculties of observation, comparison, and calculation 

 which have been given to him for the purpose of making known the 

 Creative operations in infinite space, without enlisting any aid or element 

 of science from the records of Creation in the sacred history of the 

 Jews, so ought the naturalist or geologist equally to abstain from any 

 foregone conclusion as to mode or time of operation which he might 

 believe himself able to derive from divine teachings given for another 

 end. He ought to confine himself to the deductions which rest on 

 observation and experiment, and to teach those natural truths only 

 which he has been privileged to establish by the exercise of the talents 

 entrusted to him for the discovery of the Creative operations, or the 

 power of God, in the immeasurable periods of the past. 



Far from confining his notions of the nature of the aqueous force 

 modifying the earth's crust, to a single transient cataclysmal operation, 

 Hunter remarks, " The motion of the waters is what we may consider 

 as the regular system of the world ; the sea the greater part, the lakes 

 and rivers the lesser ; each formed out of, and forming the other. The 

 lakes and rivers, though not the greatest, yet not inconsiderable, when 

 we take in the valleys and low countries that lead directly into the sea, 

 [these] having been formerly the seat of the sea, which, at a certain 

 period of its retreat, exposed, first the higher grounds, then the great 

 inlet ; whilst in many places the surface of the earth, from its forma- 

 tion, retains the water, forming lakes of various sizes, becoming a tem- 

 porary deposit for the water as it flows from the now land, as also a 

 permanent deposit of whatever these waters may rob the land of; for 

 I do conceive there was, in the retreat of the waters, a regular grada- 

 tion ; first, the whole being sea ; next, many of what are now valleys 



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