It is a vain supposition to pretend that all the earth was dissolved at the deluge, nor can
we give any foundation to such idea, but by supposing a second miracle, to give the water the property of a universal dissolvent. Besides, what annihilates the supposition, and renders it even contradictory, is, that if all matters were dissolved by that water, yet shells have not been so, since we find them entire and well preserved in all the masses which are said to have been dissolved; this evidently proves that there never was such dissolution, and that the arrangement of the parallel strata was not made in an instant, but by successive sediments: for it is evident to all who will take the trouble of observing, that the arrangement of all the materials which compose the globe, is the work of the waters. The question therefore is only whether this arrangement was made at once, or in a length of time: now we have shewn it could not be done all at once, because the materials have not kept the order of specific weight, and there has not been a general dissolution; therefore this arrangement must have been produced by sediments deposited in succession of time; any other revolution, motion, or cause, would have produced a very different arrangement. Besides, particular revolutions, or accidental causes, could not have produced a similar effect on the whole globe.
Let us see what the historian of the Academy says on this subject anno 1718, p. 3. "The numerous remains of extensive inundations, and the manner in which we must conceive mountains to have been formed, sufficiently proves that great revolutions have happened to the surface of the earth. As far as we have been able to penetrate we find little else but ruins, wrecks, and vast bodies heaped up together and incorporated into one mass, without the smallest appearance of order or design. If there is some kind of regular organization in the terrestrial globe it is deeper than we have been able to examine, and all our researches must terminate in digging among the ruins of the external coat, but which will still find sufficient employment for our philosophers.
"M. de Jussieu found in the environs of St. Chaumont a great quantity of slaty or foliated stones, every foliage of which was marked with the impression of a branch, a leaf, or the fragment of a leaf of some plant: the representations of leaves were exactly extended, as if they had been carefully spread on the stone by the hand; this proves they had been brought thither by the water, which always keeps leaves in that state: they were in different situations,
sometimes two or three together. It may easily be supposed that a leaf deposited by water upon soft mud, and afterwards covered with another layer of mud, imprints on the upper the image of one of its two surfaces, and on the under the image of the other; and on being hardened and petrified would appear to have taken different impressions; but, however natural this supposition may be, the fact is not so, for the two laminæ of stone bear impressions of the same side of the leaf, the one in alto, the other in bas releaf. It was M. Jussieu who made these observations on the figured stones of St. Chaumont; to him we shall leave the explication, and pass to objects which are more general and interesting.
"All the impressions on the stones of St. Chaumont are of foreign plants; they are not to be found in any part of France, but only in the East Indies or the hot climates of America; they are for the most part capillary plants, generally of the species of fern, whose hard and compact coat renders them more able to imprint and preserve themselves. Some leaves of Indian plants imprinted on the stones of Germany appeared astonishing to M. Leibnitz, but here we find the same wonderful affair infinitely
multiplied. There even seems in this respect to be an unaccountable destination of nature, for in all the stones of St. Chaumont not a single plant of the country has been found.
"It is certain, by the number of fossil-shells in the quarries and mountains, that this country, as well as many others, must have formerly been covered with the sea. But how has the American or Indian sea reached thither? To explain this, and many other wonderful phenomena, it may be supposed, with much probability, that the sea originally covered the whole terrestrial globe: but this supposition will not hold good, because how were terrestrial plants to exist? It evidently, therefore, must have been great inundations which have conveyed the plants of one country into the others.
"M. de Jussieu thinks, that as the bed of the sea is continually rising, in consequence of the mud and sand which the rivers incessantly convey there, the sea, at first confined between natural dykes, surmounted them, and was dispersed over the land, and that the dykes were themselves undermined by the waters and overthrown therein. In the earliest time of the formation of the earth, when no one thing had taken a regular form, prodigious and sudden
revolutions might then have been made, of which we no longer have examples, because the whole is now in such a permanent state, that the changes must be inconsiderable and by degrees.