found on the summit of hills.

3. Valleys have been excavated by running water, and floods have washed
down hills into the sea.[14]

4. Marshes have become dry ground.

5. Dry lands have been changed into stagnant pools.

6. During earthquakes some springs have been closed up, and new ones
have broken out. Rivers have deserted their channels, and have been
re-born elsewhere, as the Erasinus in Greece, and Mysus in Asia.

7. The waters of some rivers, formerly sweet, have become bitter; as
those of the Anigris, in Greece, &c.[15]

8. Islands have become connected with the mainland by the growth of
deltas and new deposits; as in the case of Antissa joined to Lesbos,
Pharos to Egypt, &c.

9. Peninsulas have been divided from the main land, and have become
islands, as Leucadia; and according to tradition, Sicily, the sea having
carried away the isthmus.

10. Land has been submerged by earthquakes; the Grecian cities of Helice
and Buris, for example, are to be seen under the sea, with their walls
inclined.

11. Plains have been upheaved into hills by the confined air seeking
vent; as at Troezene in the Peloponnesus.

12. The temperature of some springs varies at different periods. The
waters of others are inflammable.[16]

13. There are streams which have a petrifying power, and convert the
substances which they touch into marble.

14. Extraordinary medicinal and deleterious effects are produced by the
water of different lakes and springs.[17]

15. Some rocks and islands, after floating and having been subject to
violent movements, have at length become stationary and immovable; as
Delos and the Cyanean Isles.[18]

16. Volcanic vents shift their position; there was a time when Etna was
not a burning mountain, and the time will come when it will cease to
burn. Whether it be that some caverns become closed up by the movements
of the earth, and others opened, or whether the fuel is finally
exhausted, &c., &c.

The various causes of change in the inanimate world having been thus
enumerated, the doctrine of equivocal generation is next propounded, as
illustrating a corresponding perpetual flux in the animate creation.[19]

In the Egyptian and Eastern cosmogonies, and in the Greek version of
them, no very definite meaning can, in general, be attached to the term
"destruction of the world;" for sometimes it would seem almost to imply
the annihilation of our planetary system, and at others a mere
revolution of