ondary strata and
diluvian depositions could not have been local and partial phenomena, but
must have extended over the whole, or a great part of the surface, of the
globe. The remains of similar shell-fishes are found in the limestones
of the old and new continents; the teeth of the mammoth are not uncommon
in various parts of Europe; entire skeletons have been found in America,
and even the skin covered with hair and the entire body of one of these
enormous extinct animals has been discovered in Siberia preserved in a
mass of ice. In the oldest secondary strata there are no remains of such
animals as now belong to the surface; and in the rocks which may be
regarded as more recently deposited, these remains occur but rarely, and
with abundance of extinct species. There seems, as it were, a gradual
approach to the present system of things, and a succession of
destructions and creations preparatory to the existence of man. It will
be useless to push these arguments farther. You must allow that it is
impossible to defend the proposition, that the present order of things is
the ancient and constant order of Nature, only modified by existing laws,
and, consequently, the view which you have supported must be abandoned.
The monuments of extinct generations of animals are as perfect as those
of extinct nations; and it would be more reasonable to suppose that the
pillars and temples of Palmyra were raised by the wandering Arabs of the
desert, than to imagine that the vestiges of peculiar animated forms in
the strata beneath the surface belonged to the early and infant families
of the beings that at present inhabit it.

_Onu_.--I am convinced. I shall push my arguments no further, for I will
not support the sophisms of that school which supposes that living nature
has undergone gradual changes by the effects of its irritabilities and
appetencies; that the fish has in millions of generations ripened into
the quadruped, and the quadruped into the man; and that the system of
life by its own inherent powers has fitted itself to the physical changes
in the system of the universe. To this absurd, vague, atheistical
doctrine, I prefer even the dream of plastic powers, or that other more
modern dream, that the secondary strata were created, filled with
remains, as it were, of animal life, to confound the speculations of our
geological reasoners.

_The Unknown_.--I am glad you have not retreated into the desert and
defenceless wi