Admitting that there has been a gradual diminution of the waters; that the sea has transported solid matters in all directions; that the temperature of the globe is either diminishing or increasing;--none of these causes could have overturned our strata; enveloped in ice large animals, with their flesh and skin; laid dry marine testacea, the shells of which are, at the present day, as well preserved as if they had been drawn up alive from the sea; and, lastly, destroyed numerous species, and even entire genera. These considerations have struck most naturalists; and among those who have endeavoured to explain the present state of the globe, hardly any one has attributed it entirely to the agency of slow causes, still less to causes operating under our eyes. The necessity to which they are thus reduced, of seeking for causes different from those which we see acting at the present day, is the very circumstance that has forced them to make so many extraordinary suppositions, and to lose themselves in so many erroneous and contradictory speculations, that the very name of their science, as I have elsewhere remarked, has long been a subject of ridicule to prejudiced persons, who have only looked to the systems which it has been the means of hatching, and have forgotten the extensive and important series of authentic facts which it has brought to light[14]. _Older Systems of Geologists._ During a long time, two events or epochs only, the Creation and the Deluge, were admitted as comprehending the changes which have been operated upon the globe; and all the efforts of geologists were directed to account for the present existing state of things, by imagining a certain original state, afterwards modified by the deluge, of which also, as to its causes, its operations, and its effects, each entertained his own theory. Thus, according to one[15], the earth was at first invested with an uniform light crust, which covered the abyss of the sea; and which being broken up for the production of the deluge, formed the mountains by its fragments. According to another[16], the deluge was occasioned by a momentary suspension of cohesion among the particles of mineral bodies; the whole mass of the globe was dissolved, and the paste thus formed became penetrated with shells. According to a third[17], God raised up the mountains for the purpose of allowing the waters, which had produced the deluge, to run off; and selected those places in which there was the greatest quantity of rocks, without which the mountains could not have supported themselves. A fourth[18] created the earth from the atmosphere of one comet, and deluged it by the tail of another: The heat which it retained from its origin, was what, in his opinion, excited the whole of the living beings upon it to sin; for which they were all drowned, excepting the fishes, whose passions were apparently less vehement.