phlogistic composition of those
bodies. This composition is quickly resolved in combustion; but it is no
less surely resolved by the influences of the sun and atmosphere, only
in a slower manner. Therefore, to place the permanency of this earth, or
any of its surface, upon a substance which in that situation necessarily
decays, is to form a speculation inconsistent with the principles of
natural philosophy[11].

[Footnote 11: It is from inadvertency to this fact in natural history,
the consuming of vegetable substances exposed to the influences of the
atmosphere, that M. de Luc, in his _Histoire de la Terre_, has pretended
to determine the past duration of the German heaths as not of a very
high antiquity. He has measured the increase of the vegetable soil, an
increase formed by the accumulation of the decayed heath; and, from the
annual increase or deposits of vegetable matter on that surface, he has
formed a calculation which he then applies to every period of this turfy
augmentation, not considering that there may be definitive causes which
increase with this growing soil, and which, increasing at a greater rate
in proportion as the soil augments, may set a period to the further
augmentation of that vegetable soil. Such is fire in the burning of
those parched heaths; such is the slower but constant and growing
operation of the oxygenating atmosphere upon this turfy substance
exposed to the air and moisture. This author has very well described the
constant augmentation of this vegetable substance in the morasses of
that country, as it also happens in those of our own; but there is a
wide difference in those two cases of peat bog and healthy turf; the
vegetable substance in the morass is under water, and therefore has
its inflammable quality or combustible substance protected from the
consuming operation of the vital or atmospheric air; the turfy soil,
on the contrary, is exposed to this source of resolution in the other
situation.]

But even supposing that the degradation of mountains were to be
suspended by the pretended compensation which is formed, by the rivers
carrying mineral mud into the sea, and the air and rain producing
vegetable earth; in what must this operation end? In carrying into the
sea, to be deposited at its bottom, all the vegetable earth produced
by the air and rain. But our cosmologist, in thus procuring an eternal
station to his mountains, has not told us whether this transmutation of
the air