ewed; and the merits and defects of the doctrines of Hooke, Ray,
Moro, Buffon, and others, fairly estimated. Great admiration is
expressed for the hypothesis of Hooke, and his explanation of the origin
of the strata is shown to have been more correct than Moro's, while
their theory of the effects of earthquakes was the same. Raspe had not
seen Michell's memoirs, and his views concerning the geological
structure of the earth were perhaps less enlarged; yet he was able to
add many additional arguments in favor of Hook's theory, and to render
it, as he said, a nearer approach to what Hooke would have written had
he lived in later times. As to the periods wherein all the earthquakes
happened, to which we owe the elevation of various parts of our
continents and islands, Raspe says he pretends not to assign their
duration, still less to defend Hooke's suggestion, that the convulsions
almost all took place during the deluge of Noah. He adverts to the
apparent indications of the former tropical heat of the climate of
Europe, and the changes in the species of animals and plants, as among
the most obscure and difficult problems in geology. In regard to the
islands raised from the sea, within the times of history or tradition,
he declares that some of them were composed of strata containing organic
remains, and that they were not, as Buffon had asserted, made of mere
volcanic matter. His work concludes with an eloquent exhortation to
naturalists to examine the isles which rose, in 1707, in the Grecian
Archipelago, and, in 1720, in the Azores, and not to neglect such
splendid opportunities of studying nature "in the act of parturition."
That Hooke's writings should have been neglected for more than half a
century, was matter of astonishment to Raspe; but it is still more
wonderful that his own luminous exposition of that theory should, for
more than another half century, have excited so little interest.

_Fuchsel_, 1762 and 1773.--Fuchsel, a German physician, published, in
1762, a geological description of the country between the Thuringerwald
and the Hartz, and a memoir on the environs of Rudelstadt;[89] and
afterwards, in 1773, a theoretical work on the ancient history of the
earth and of man.[90] He had evidently advanced considerably beyond his
predecessor Lehman, and was aware of the distinctness, both as to
position and fossil contents, of several groups of strata of different
ages, corresponding to the secondary formations no