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trees and plants. Assuming these for the generalities of the earth’s 
external form, it is evident that the waters, whether supplied by 
the rain alone, or by other sources, as seems to be implied by the 
breaking up of the fountains of the great deep, must necessarily 
have first filled the lower parts of the earth. When it attained a 
greater height, then must this powerful element have rushed in 
torrents from valley to valley, breaking down, or surmounting, every 
intervening obstacle ; and laying prostrate the vast forests with which 
the surface was every where clothed. Of the trees thus overthrown, 
the lowest stratum of vegetable matter would be formed, which would 
soon become buried beneath the sediment, which would be con- 
tinually depositing from the superincumbent waters, loaded with 
every species of earthy, and even mineral matters, with which they 
would be impregnated by the effects of an alluviation more powerful 
than we can possibly conceive. 
As the volume of the water increased, the sides of the mountains 
would become subjected to the violence of its action. The roots of 
the trees, which grew on their sides, would become loosened, and 
the trees themselves, and the earth in which they had grown, with 
the various other vegetables which had been generated and nou- 
rished in the same matrix, would fall into the flood, and become 
collected in particular spots. Thus would masses of vegetable 
matter, immense beyond conception, become subjected to the domi- 
nation of this powerful element. These several masses of vegetable 
matter would become covered by strata of earth formed by the gra- 
dual deposition of ponderous, but minutely divided particles, which 
would soon form a covering so compact, as would be able con- 
siderably to resist the ordinary fluctuation of the water. Similar 
alternating strata, constituted by the accumulating masses of vege- 
table matter, and the subsidence of particles of earth, may be sup- 
posed to be thus continually forming until the waters had covered 
the tops of the high hills. 
