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over the whole earth of a general catastrophe, belongs to these 
last. They have found in the mountains of Hesse a stone which 
appears to be marked with the impression of a turbot, and on 
the Alps a petrified pike ; they have therefore concluded that 
the sea and the rivers have flowed over the mountains. It was 
more natural to suspect that the fish, carried by a traveller, got 
stale, were cast away, and became petrified during a lapse of 
time. But this idea was too simple and not systematic enough. 
They say that they have discovered an anchor of a ship on a 
Swiss mountain ; they do not reflect that people have often 
carried great bundles in their arms, and even cannon. It may 
be that they used this anchor to stop the bundles going down 
cracks in the rocks. It may be that they took this anchor 
from one of the little ports of the Lake of Geneva. It may be, 
finally, that the story is fabulous, and they prefer to assert that 
this was the anchor of a ship which was wrecked in Switzer- 
land before the Deluge. The tongue of a dog-fish has some 
relation in shape to a stone, which has been called Glossopetre : 
this is enough to satisfy the physicians that these stones are as 
many tongues as the dog-fish left in the Apennines in the 
of Noah.’ 
4 The reptiles, when they are not in movement, usually assume 
the spiral shape ; and it is not surprising that when they become 
petrified, the stone takes the shapeless figure of a Yolute. It is 
again more natural that these are stones which formed them- 
selves in spirals; the Alps and the Yosges are full of them. 
It has pleased naturalists to call these stones comes d’ Ammon. 
The fish called the nautilus, which has not been seen, and 
which was produced in the Indian Sea, is recognized in rela- 
tion to them. Without too carefully examining whether this 
petrified fish is a nautilus or an eel, they conclude that the 
Indian Sea formerly inundated the mountains of Europe. 
Little shells have been seen in the provinces of Italy, of France, 
&c., which are stated to be originally from the Syrian Sea. 
I will not contest their origin ; but may we not remember that 
the innumerable crowd of pilgrims and Crusaders carried its 
money to the Holy Land and brought back shells ? Or would 
one rather believe that the Sea of Joppa and Sidon came to 
cover Burgundy and the Milanese P One might dispense well 
with the belief in one or the other of these hypotheses, and 
think, with many physicians, that these shells which are 
believed to have come from so far off, are fossils which the 
earth produced. We might, on the other hand, with more 
approach to reality, conjecture that there were formerly lakes 
in those localities where the shells are to be seen to-day. But 
whatever opinion or whatever error is inculcated, do these 
shells prove that all the universe has been capsized from top to 
