tone. But the two pieces are again cemented; or they had been
shifted when the stone was in that soft state, by which the two pieces
are made perfectly to cohere. Those shifts and veins, in this species of
stone, are extremely instructive, illustrating the mineral operations of
the globe.

In like manner to the north of the Grampians, along the south side of
Loch Ness, there are mountains formed of the debris of schistus and
granite mountains, first manufactured into sand and gravel, and then
consolidated into a pudding-stone, which is always formed upon the same
principle. The same is also found upon the south side of those mountains
in the shire of Angus.

I may also give for example the African _Brechia_, which is a
pudding-stone of the same nature. This stone is composed of granites or
porphyries, serpentines and schisti, extremely indurated and perfectly
consolidated. It is also demonstrable from the appearance in this stone
that it has been in a softened state, from the shape and application
of its constituent parts; and in a specimen of it which I have in my
cabinet, there is also a demonstration of calcareous spar flowing among
the gravel of the consolidated rock.

This fact therefore of pudding-stone mountains, is a general fact, so
far as it is founded upon observations that are made in Africa, Germany,
and Britain. We may now reason upon this general fact, in order to see
how far it countenances the idea of primitive mountains, on the one
hand, or on the other supports the present theory, which admits of
nothing primitive in the visible or examinable parts of the earth.

To a person who examines accurately the composition of our mountains,
which occupy the south of Scotland, no argument needs be used to
persuade him that the bodies in question are not primitive; the thing
is evident from inspection, as much as would be the ruins of an ancient
city, although there were no record of its history. The visible
materials, which compose for the most part the strata of our south
alpine schisti, are so distinctly the _debris_ and _detritus_ of a
former earth, and so similar in their nature with those which for the
most part compose the strata on all hands acknowledged as secondary,
that there can remain no question upon that head. The consolidation,
again, of those strata, and the erection of them from their original
position, and from the place in which they had been formed, is another
question.

But the acknow