d
indiscriminately with those of other animals, identical with
those which exist at present. These beds are generally
moveable, sandy, or marly, and always within a short distance
of the surface. It is therefore probable that these bones have
been enveloped by the last catastrophe of the globe. In a great
number of places, they are accompanied by the accumulated
spoils of marine animals; in other places, but these are less
numerous, the remains of marine animals are not found, and
sometimes the sand or marle that covers them contains only
fresh-water shells. Although a small number of shells attached
to fossil bones indicate that, they have remained some time
under water, yet is there no authentic account of their having
been found covered with regular stony beds, filled with marine
remains, nor, in consequence, is there any proof of the sea
having made a long and peaceable stay above them.

"The catastrophe that has covered them, would appear then to
have been a great marine inundation, of no long duration, were
it not that they are found upon the tops of high mountains,
whither the waters of our present ocean could never have
reached in their most violent agitations. On the other hand,
these bones presenting no appearance of having been rolled,
being occasionally only fractured, as the remains of our
present domestic animals may occasionally be, and being
sometimes found in entire skeletons, and accumulated as if in a
common cemetery, demonstrate that the living beings to which
they have belonged, must have met their fate in the very parts
of the globe in which we now find the fossil monuments of their
existence."

All the animals of which we have particularly spoken, are of genera now
only found in the torrid zone, and the abundance of food which their
great size would have caused them to require, renders their existence in
numbers only possible in a warm climate. Their remains are, however,
found in almost polar regions, whence we obtain a third link in the
chain of evidence, that before the last great catastrophe to which the
globe was subjected, its surface must have been warmer than at present.

We have seen in a former place, that such a change of temperature may
have gradually occurred in consequence of a cooling of the external
surface of the globe by an excess of its