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hand of the Creator, more regularly placed as a planet in our solar 
system. 
•/ 
Before that time, he supposes it to have been a globe without beauty or 
proportion; a world in disorder; subject to all the vicissitudes which comets 
endure; some of which have been found, at different times, a thousand times 
hotter than melted iron; at others, a thousand times colder than ice. 
Ihese alterations of heat and cold, continually melting and freezing the 
surface of the earth, he supposes to have produced, to a certain depth, a 
chaos entirely similar to that described by the poets, surrounding the solid 
contents of the earth, which still continued unchanged in the midst, making 
a great burning globe of more than two thousand leagues in diameter. This 
surrounding chaos, however, was far from being solid: he resembles it to a 
dense though fluid atmosphere, composed of substances mingled, agitated, 
and shocked against each other; and in this disorder he describes the earth 
to have been just at the eve of creation. 
But upon its orbit being then changed, when it was more regularly 
wheeled round the sun, every thing took its proper place; every part of the 
surrounding fluid then fell into its situation, in proportion as it was light or 
heavy. 
The middle, or central part, which always remained unchanged, still 
continued so, retaining a part of that heat which it received in its pri¬ 
meval approaches towards the sun; which heat, he calculates, may continue 
for about six thousand years! 
Next to this fell the heavier parts of the chaotic atmosphere, which 
serve to sustain the lighter: but as in descending they could not entirely be 
separated from many watery parts, with which they were intimately mixed, 
they drew down a part of these also with them; and these could not mount 
again after the surface of the earth was consolidated: they, therefore, sur¬ 
rounded the heavy first descending parts, in the same manner as these 
surround the central globe. 
Thus the entire body of the earth is composed internally of a great 
burning madd ; next which is placed an heavy terrene substance, that 
encompasses it; round which also is circumfused a body of water. 
Upon this body of water the crust of earth on which we inhabit is placed: 
so that, according to him, the globe is composed of a number of coats, or 
shells, one within the other, all of different densities. 
