(1708), "Piscium Querelae
et Vindiciae," a work of zoological merit, in which he gave some good
plates and descriptions of fossil fish. Among other conclusions he
labored to prove that the earth had been remodelled at the deluge.
Pluche, also, in 1732, wrote to the same effect; while Holbach, in 1753,
after considering the various attempts to refer all the ancient
formations to the flood of Noah, exposed the inadequacy of this cause.

_Italian Geologists--Vallisneri._--I return with pleasure to the
geologists of Italy, who preceded, as has been already shown, the
naturalists of other countries in their investigations into the ancient
history of the earth, and who still maintained a decided pre-eminence.
They refuted and ridiculed the physico-theological systems of Burnet,
Whiston, and Woodward;[70] while Vallisneri,[71] in his comments on the
Woodwardian theory, remarked how much the interests of religion, as well
as those of sound philosophy, had suffered by perpetually mixing up the
sacred writings with questions in physical science. The works of this
author were rich in original observations. He attempted the first
general sketch of the marine deposits of Italy, their geographical
extent, and most characteristic organic remains. In his treatise "On the
Origin of Springs," he explained their dependence on the order, and
often on the dislocations, of the strata, and reasoned philosophically
against the opinions of those who regarded the disordered state of the
earth's crust as exhibiting signs of the wrath of God for the sins of
man. He found himself under the necessity of contending, in his
preliminary chapter, against St. Jerome, and four other principal
interpreters of Scripture, besides several professors of divinity, "that
springs did not flow by subterranean siphons and cavities from the sea
upwards, losing their saltness in the passage," for this theory had been
made to rest on the infallible testimony of Holy Writ.

Although reluctant to generalize on the rich materials accumulated in
his travels, Vallisneri had been so much struck with the remarkable
continuity of the more recent marine strata, from one end of Italy to
the other, that he came to the conclusion that the ocean formerly
extended over the whole earth, and after abiding there for a long time,
had gradually subsided. This opinion, however untenable, was a great
step beyond Woodward's diluvian hypothesis, against which Vallisneri,
and after him all