s forced it to ooze upward, and thus a great
quantity of aqueous vapor was produced on the surface of the globe. As
this elastic fluid rose into outer space, its continually increasing
expansion must have proportionately lowered its temperature; and, in
consequence, a part was recondensed into water and sank back towards the
more solid surface of the globe.

"And in this manner, for a certain time, a violent reciprocation of
atmospheric phenomena must have continued--torrents of vapor rising
outwardly, while equally tremendous torrents of condensed vapor, or
rain, fell towards the earth. The accumulation of the latter on the
yet unstable and unconsolidated surface of the globe constituted the
primeval ocean. The surface of this ocean was exposed to continued
vaporization owing to intense heat; but this process, abstracting
caloric from the stratum of the water below, by partially cooling it,
tended to preserve the remainder in a liquid form. The ocean will have
contained, both in solution and suspension, many of the matters carried
upward from the granitic bed in which the vapors from whose condensation
it proceeded were produced, and which they had traversed in their rise.
The dissolved matters will have been silex, carbonates, and sulphates
of lime, and those other mineral substances which water at an intense
temperature and under such circumstances was enabled to hold in
solution. The suspended substances will have been all the lighter and
finer particles of the upper beds where the disintegration had been
extreme; and particularly their mica, which, owing to the tenuity of its
plate-shaped crystals, would be most readily carried up by the ascending
fluid, and will have remained longest in suspension.

"But as the torrents of vapor, holding these various matters in
solution and suspension, were forced upward, the greater part of the
disintegrated crystals by degrees subsided; those of felspar and quartz
first, the mica being, as observed above, from the form of its plates,
of peculiar buoyancy, and therefore held longest in suspension.

"The crystals of felspar and quartz as they subsided, together with a
small proportion of mica, would naturally arrange themselves so as to
have their longest dimensions more or less parallel to the surface on
which they rest; and this parallelism would be subsequently increased,
as we shall see hereafter, by the pressure of these beds sustained
between the weight of the supported c