ON THE DELUGE. 



the waters, other substances, such as earth, mud, bones, animal 

 and human remains, &c., may have been held at various 

 depths until decomposed by water ; or combined and consoli- 

 dated by volcanic gases, or electric currents. Tn this manner 

 the preservation of delicate corallines, shells, skeletons of 

 animals, &c., may be accounted for. Suspended in water, 

 surrounded by earth in a dissolved state, combined by che- 

 mical agency, deposited on land, and consolidated by pressure, 

 by volcanic or by latent heat, they may have become fossils. 

 Thick skinned animals may have- floated longest, because 

 their hides would have buoyed them up for a greater length 

 of time,* hence their remains should be found near, or upon 

 the surface of the ground, in some cases water- worn, in others 

 uninjured, according as they had been strewed among shingle, 

 or deposited in a yielding mass. That bones were not rolled 

 about much among the stones in which they are found,-f- is 

 evident from the fact that bones, if so rolled among them, 

 would soon be ground to powder. It is clear that, however 

 much the bones may have been water-worn before deposition 

 on land, both they, and the adjacent shingle, must have been 

 deposited there nearly about the same time. 



Tripoli stone, and other substances composed chiefly5 if not 

 entirely, of niicroscopic insects, may have been formed by the 

 accumulation and cohesion of myriads of such minute crea- 

 tures, swept together off the land, like swarms of locusts, 

 aggregated by "the rolling of the waves, agglutinated, deposited 

 on the land, and afterwards heavily compressed. Or they may 

 liave been insects bred in water; such as those which Mr. 

 Darwin calculated to amount to " one hundred* thousand in a 

 square inch of surface v/hile the sea was streaked with them 

 for a great distance. J: Microscopic objects such as these may 

 have been killed by some gas rising from a volcano beneath ; 

 then drawn together by mutual attraction, rolled over and 



* When ' bloAvn ' after putrefaction beg-an. 

 t Those, for instance, of Blanco Bay, p. 112. 



X Darwin's Letters to Professor Henslow, printed for private distribu- 

 tion among- the members of the Cambridg'e Philosophical Society : in 

 1835. 



