I have often examined quarries, the banks of which were filled with shells; I have seen entire hills composed of them, and chains of rocks which contained them throughout their whole extent. The quantity of these marine productions is astonishing, and the number in many places so prodigious, that it appears scarcely possible that any should now remain in the sea; it is by considering this innumerable multitude of shells, that no doubt is left of our earth having been a long time under the water of the ocean. The quantity found in a fossil, or petrified state, is beyond conception, and it is only from the number of those that have been discovered that we could possibly have formed an idea of their multiplicity. We must imagine, like those who reason on matters they never saw, that shells are only found at random, dispersed here and there, or in small heaps, as oyster shells thrown before our doors; on the contrary, they form mountains, are met with in shoals of 100 or 200 miles length, nay, they may sometimes be traced through whole provinces in masses of 50 or 60 feet thick. It is from these circumstances alone that we can reason on the subject. We cannot give a more striking example on this subject than the shells of Touraine. The following is the description given of them by the historian of the Academy[220:A]. "The number of figured stones and fossil shells found in the bowels of the earth were remarked in all ages and nations, but they were considered merely as the sports of nature, and even by philosophers themselves, as the productions of chance or accident; they regarded them with a degree of surprise, but passed them over with a slight attention, and all this phenomena perished without any fruit for the progress of knowledge. A potter in Paris, who knew neither Latin nor Greek, towards the end of the 16th century, was the first man who dared affirm, in opposition to the learned, that the fossil shells were real shells formerly deposited by the sea in those places where they were found; that animals, and particularly fish, had given to stones all these different figures, &c. and he desired the whole school of Aristotle to contradict his proofs. This was Bernard Palissy, as great a natural genius as nature could form: his system slept near 100 years, and even his name was almost forgot. At length the ideas of Palissy were revived in the mind of several philosophers; and science has profited by all the shells and figured stones the earth furnishes us with; perhaps they are at present become only too common, and the consequences drawn from them too incontestable.