OPINIONS OF VOLTAIRE AND LAPLACE REGARDING GEOLOGY. 315 
regarding changes of climate so fully developing themselves. 
There is no doubt that Voltaire knew much which he did not 
care to advance in this chapter ; hut it is a characteristic of his 
style to sacrifice everything to the opportunity of an onslaught 
against what he considered unreasonable or dogmatic. Never- 
theless, as will he noticed further on, Voltaire never grasped the 
possibility of any secular changes in the relative level of land 
and sea floor ; subsidence on a grand scale does not appear to 
have been a notion within his imagination, although he appears 
to accept it as a cause of the production of some islands. In 
one essay he is sincerely uniformitarian in his views — the subject 
still being on the changes which have occurred on the globe. 
He says, — 
4 When one’s own eyes have seen a mountain advance on to 
a plain — that is to say, an immense rock of the mountain become 
detached and cover some fields, an entire castle sink into the 
earth, a river swallowed up, and which comes forth from its 
abyss further on, the indubitable marks that a vast mass of 
water formerly inundated a country now inhabited, and a 
hundred vestiges of other revolutions, one is more disposed to 
believe in the great changes which have altered the surface of 
the earth, than a Parisian lady, who only knows that her 
house is built where there was formerly tilled ground, may be. 
But a Neapolitan lady, who has seen the subterranean ruins 
of Herculaneum, is less a slave to the prejudice which would 
have us believe that everything has always been as it is 
to-day.’ 
4 Was there a great conflagration in the days of a Phaeton? 
Nothing is more likely : but it was neither the ambition of 
Phaeton nor the anger of Thundering Jove which caused the 
catastrophe. Similarly, in Lisbon in 1755, it was not the fires 
so frequently lit by the Inquisition which attracted Divine 
vengeance, which lit the subterranean fires, and which destroyed 
half of the town. For Mequinez, Tetuan, and considerable 
hordes of Arabs were more maltreated than Lisbon, and there 
was no Inquisition in those countries. 
4 The island of San Domingo, lately quite ruined, was not 
more displeasing to the Great Being than the island of Corsica. 
Everything is subject to eternal physical laws. The sulphur, 
the bitumen, the nitre, the iron, enclosed in the earth have 
thrown down a thousand cities by their mixtures and ex- 
plosions, have opened and shut thousands of cracks, and we are 
threatened daily by accidents which depend upon the manner 
in which the world has been made, just as we are menaced in 
many countries during the winter by starving wolves and 
tigers. If fire, which Democritus believed was the first 
principle, has ruined one part of the earth, the first principle 
