es blocs; mais ces
rencontres sont fort rares."

Here is a distinct view of this part of nature; a view in which the
present state of things plainly indicates what has passed, without
our being obliged to raise our imagination to so high a pitch as is
sometimes required, when we take the mountains themselves, instead of
these blocks, as steps of the investigation. Here is a view, therefore,
that must convince the most scrupulous, or jealous with regard to the
admitting of theory, first, that those mountains had been much higher;
secondly, that they had been degraded in their present place; thirdly,
that this continent has subsisted in its present place for a very
long space of time, during the slow progress of those imperceptible
operations; and, lastly, that much of the solid parts of this earth has
been thus travelled by the waters to the sea, after serving the purpose
of soil upon the surface of the land.

But though M. Hassenfratz has thus given us a most satisfactory view of
the natural history of those blocks of stone which are now upon or near
their native place, this will not explain other appearances of the same
kind, where such blocks are found at great distances from their native
places, in situations where the means of their transportation is not
to be immediately perceived, such as those resting upon the Jura and
Saleve, and where blocks of different kinds of stone are collected
together. These last examples are the records of something still more
distant in the natural history of this earth; and they give us a more
extensive view of those operations by which the surface of this earth
is continually changing. It is, however, extremely interesting to this
Theory of the Earth, to have so distinctly ascertained some of those
first steps by which we are to ascend in taking the more distant
prospect; and these observations of M. Hassenfratz answer this end most
completely.

Thus all the appearances upon the surface of this earth tend to show
that there is no part of that surface to be acknowledged as in its
original state, that is to say, the state in which it had come
immediately from the mineral operations of the globe; but that, every
where, the effects of other operations are to be perceived in the
present state of things. The reason of this will be evident, when we
consider, that the operations of the mineral kingdom have properly in
view to consolidate the loose materials which had been deposited and
a