225. Mere words should have little power to mislead, in a science which treats of sensible objects, such as are always easily subjected to the examination of sight or of touch; yet there is some appearance as if the Neptunists were misled in this, and other instances, by the term _stratification_. Though an incrustation on the perpendicular face of a rock has very little affinity to a stratum, such as we are accustomed to see deposited by water, yet the same name being once imposed on both, mineralogists have proceeded to reason concerning them, as if they were precisely the same thing, and were both to be ascribed to the same cause. Indeed every perpendicular or highly inclined bed of stone, is inexplicable as an effect of aqueous deposition, in a system, unprovided, as the Neptunian is,[118] with the means of raising up such beds from a horizontal into a vertical position. This observation may also be extended to all cases of vertical stratification. Water cannot directly arrange its deposits in planes highly inclined, and therefore I have often wondered to see the Neptunists contending so eagerly for the stratification of certain rocks, such as granite, which, being vertical, or highly inclined, was much less friendly to their system than the entire absence of all stratification would have been. I was disposed to admire their candour, when the use which they made of the fact convinced me, that I ought only to wonder at their inconsequential reasoning. The Huttonian Theory is, indeed, the only one which possesses the means of reconciling the elevation of the strata with their horizontal deposition, and which is entitled to consider stratification, in whatever plane it may be, as originally the work of the ocean. The geologists who attach themselves exclusively to the action of water, will never be able to extend the dominion of that element so far as Dr Hutton has done, by combining it with fire. [Footnote 118: See preceding note.] 226. But, though the Neptunian system were provided with engines, powerful enough to raise up strata from a level to a vertical plane, this would avail nothing in the present instance; since, on no supposition, can the incrustations on the perpendicular sides of a vein have ever been horizontal. On no supposition, therefore, can these incrustations be received as a proof of aqueous deposition: it may indeed be certainly inferred from them, that the matter which they consist of was fluid at the time of their formation; but the absence of all appearance of a horizontal disposition, in any part of the vein, amounts nearly to a demonstration, that this fluidity did not proceed from solution in a menstruum. We must therefore conceive the coats to have been formed during the refrigeration of the melted matter injected from the mineral regions into the clefts and fissures of the strata. (§ 59.)