ea from whence either they themselves or their materials had
come. In proportion as the mountains are diminished, the haugh or plain
between them grows more wide, and also on a lower level; but, while
there is a river running in a plain, and floods produced in the seasons
of rain, there can be nothing stable in this constitution of things
evidently founded upon change.

The description now given is from the rivers of this country, where it
is not unfrequent to see relicts of three or four different haughs which
had occupied the same spot of ground upon different levels, consequently
which had been formed and destroyed at different periods of time. But
the same operation is transacted every where; it is seen upon the plains
of Indostan, as in the haughs of Scotland; the Ganges operates upon its
banks, and is employed in changing its bed continually as well as the
Tweed[10]. The great city of Babylon was built upon the haugh of a river.
What is become of that city? nothing remains,--even the place, on which
it stood, is not known.

[Footnote 10: An Account of the Ganges and Burrampooter Rivers, by James
Rennel, Esquire. Philosophical Transactions, 1781.]

CHAP. VII.

_The Same Subject continued, in giving a View
of the Operations of Air and Water upon the
Surface of the Land._

We have but to enlarge our thoughts with regard to things past by
attending to what we see at present, and we shall understand many things
which to a more contracted view appear to be in nature insulated or
without a proper cause; such are those great blocks of granite so
foreign to the place on which they stand, and so large as to seem to
have been transported by some power unnatural to the place from whence
they came. We have but to consider the surface of this earth as having
been upon a higher level; as having been every where the beds of rivers,
which had moved the matter of strata and fragments of rocks, now no more
existing; and as thus disposed upon different planes, which are, like
the haughs of rivers, changing in a continual succession, but changing
upon a scale too slow to be perceived. M. de Luc has given a picture
which is very proper to assist our imagination in contemplating a more
ancient state of this earth, although in this he has a very different
end in view, and means to show that the world, which we inhabit at
present, is of a recent date. It is in the 32d letter of his Histoire de
la Terre, which I beg leave here to