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dependent portions of mountains, with their newly-produced forests, 
would frequently be sinking in the surrounding waters. Thus would 
additional layers of vegetable, and of earthy matters, be repeatedly 
formed over those strata of vegetables which had been overthrown 
by the first violence of the deluge. 
As when the greater part of the waters of the deluge had drained 
off, and when the surface of the globe again became divided into 
water and dry land, the lower and more excavated parts would 
necessarily retain the water for a long time : thus, as well as the 
rivers and seas, would immense lakes be formed. In these lakes 
would the numerous tribe of aquatic plants flourish, which, as the 
waters at last subsided, would cover the bottoms of these hollows 
with a mass of vegetable matter, which becoming gradually covered 
by a coat of eartli, would be sticured from the action of the air. 
From the numerous revolutions which the newly-formed earth would 
be destined for a time to undergo, many of these hollows might be 
again filled with water. Adjoining lakes might burst through their 
interposed mounds, and thus refill them ; or among the mountains 
which helped to form the basons of these lakes, some of which had 
been weakened in their bases, by the previous action of the waters, 
might now become more effectually undermined, and might fall 
into the lake beneath, and thus force the water beyond its newly- 
established limits. In new lakes thus formed in the cavities of 
previously existing ones, aquatic vegetation would again go on, 
whilst a compact stratum from the subsidence of the suspended 
earth would form at the bottom ; and when the waters themselves 
had drained away, a fresh accumulation of vegetable matter would 
be formed, which would, like ' the former, become covered with a 
stratum of mud, capable of acquiring, as in the former instance, a 
considerable degree of hardness. 
Such of the vegetable matters as might float on the last remaining 
waters of the deluge, might be washed into other hollows of less 
