[104] Ed. Phil. Trans. 1788.
[105] Playfair's Works, vol. iv. p. 75.
[106] "Before me things create were none, save things Eternal."—Dante's Inferno, canto iii. Cary's Translation.
[107] Playfair's Works, vol. iv. p. 55.
[108] In allusion to the theories of Burnet, Woodward, and other physico-theological writers, he declared that they were as fond of changes of scene on the face of the globe, as were the populace at a play. "Every one of them destroys and renovates the earth after his own fashion, as Descartes framed it: for philosophers put themselves without ceremony in the place of God, and think to create a universe with a word."—Dissertation envoyée a l'Academie de Boulogne, sur les Changemens arrivés dans notre Globe. Unfortunately, this and similar ridicule directed against the cosmogonists was too well deserved.
[109] See the chapter on "Des Pierres figurés."
[110] In that essay he lays it down, "that all naturalists are now agreed that deposits of shells in the midst of the continents are monuments of the continued occupation of these districts by the ocean." In another place also, when speaking of the fossil shells of Touraine, he admits their true origin.
[111] As an instance of his desire to throw doubt indiscriminately on all geological data, we may recall the passage where he says, that "the bones of a reindeer and hippopotamus discovered near Etempes did not prove, as some would have it, that Lapland and the Nile were once on a tour from Paris to Orleans, but merely that a lover of curiosities once preserved them in his cabinet."
"Some drill and bore The solid earth, and from the strata there Extract a register, by which we learn That he who made it, and revealed its date To Moses, was mistaken in its age." The Task, book iii. "The Garden."