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has never changed. Further on he attacks the people who 
are affected by the petrified turbot and pike already noticed, 
and says that they argue against sound physical reasoning ; 
and adds, * The love of the marvellous renders systematic 
philosophy childish ; hut Nature seems to please itself in uni- 
formity and constancy, although our imagination revels in great 
changes/ This excessive uniformitarianism, a little con- 
tradictory to expressions used hut a few lines hack, is utilized 
by Yoltaire in the next sentence. He states that Scripture 
tells us there has been a deluge, hut there does not appear 
to be any other ‘ monument 5 of it than the memory of a 
terrible prodigy, which warns us in vain to he just. 
In noticing the dendritic markings on such stones as agates, 
some kinds of marble, and flints, Yoltaire states that ‘it was not 
a tree or a house, or a man’s face, which left an impression on 
the little stones at a time when they might have been soft or 
fluid, and that these are instances of an empire of whose power 
there is no doubt/ 
Then he makes a jumble between dendrites and the true im- 
pressions of plants. He says, ‘ To say that the imprints of leaves 
of trees, which only grow in India have been seen on these 
dendrites, is it not to advance a matter barely proved? 
Does not such a fiction follow suit on the romance, imagined 
by some people, that the Indian sea came formerly into 
Germany, Gaul and Spain ? The Huns and the Goths 
certainly came there, hut the sea does not travel like men. 
It gravitates eternally towards the centre of the globe ; it 
obeys the laws of Nature ; and if it could have made this 
trip, how could it have brought the leaves of India to deposit 
them on the agates of Bohemia ?’ He insists upon this logic, 
and says that it enables him to nullify the opinion that the 
little fishes of the most distant seas have come to inhabit 
the quarries of Montmartre and the tops of the Alps and 
Pyrenees. 
Yoltaire believed that Nature amused herself in forming as 
many kinds of stones as animals : she produced them in the 
resemblance of parts of organisms, or twisted them in spirals, 
which some people have foolishly called Comes d’ Ammon. With 
regard to the knotty subject of the production of flints, he 
wants to know ‘What stony juice made the thousand kinds of 
flint? How is it that in many of our countries not a 
single flint is to he seen, whilst others are covered with them ? 
Why is it that in America, near the Amazon, none are to be 
found for 500 leagues ? Sometimes enormous flints are to he 
found in the middle of fields, and close to them are others, not an 
inch in diameter, some are even only two or three lines across. 
Their specific gravity differs ; in some it is that of iron, and in 
