the land
or coast, there being a declivity towards the deepest bottom of the
sea, and there being currents in the waters of the ocean occasionally
rendered more rapid on the shore, every moveable thing must tend to
travel from the coast, and to proceed alone; the shelving bottom of the
sea into the unfathomable deep, when they are beyond the reach of man or
the possibility of returning to the shore.

But it is not every where upon the coast that those materials are
equally delivered; neither is it every where along the shore that the
currents of the ocean are equally perceived, or operate with equal power
in moving bodies along the shelving bottom of the sea. Hence in some
places deep water is found washing rocky coasts, where the waste of land
is only to be perceived from what is visibly wanting in the continuity
of those hard and solid bodies. In other places, again, the land appears
to grow and to encroach upon the space which had been occupied by the
sea; for here the materials of the land are so accumulated on the coast,
that the bottom of the sea is filled up, and dry land is formed in the
bafon of the sea, from those materials which the rivers had brought down
upon the shore.[12]

[Footnote 12: We are not however to estimate this operation, of forming
soil by the muddy waters of a river depositing sediment, in the manner
that M. de Luc has endeavoured to calculate the short time elapsed in
forming the marshlands of the Elbe. This philosopher, with a view to
show that the present earth has not subsisted long since the time it had
appeared above the surface of the sea, has given an example of the marsh
of _Wisebhafen_ where the earth, wasted by inundation, was in a very
little time replaced, and the soil heightened by the flowings of the
Elbe, and this he marks as a leading fact or principle, in calculating
the past duration of our continents, of which he says, we are not to
lose sight (Tome 5, p. 136.) But here this philosopher does not seem
to be aware, that he is calculating upon very false grounds, when he
compares two things which are by no means alike, the natural operations
of a river upon its banks, making and unmaking occasionally its haughs
or level lands, that is to say, alternately making and destroying, and
the artificial operations of man receiving the muddy water of a tide-way
into the still water of a pond formed by his ramparts; yet, it is by
this last operation that our author forms an estimate w