424. The same hurry and impatience are visible in the manner in which his argument against Dr Hutton is usually conducted. He has seldom been careful to make himself master of the opinions of his adversary; and what he gives as such, and directs his reasonings against, have often no resemblance to them whatsoever. Without any intention to deceive others, but deceived himself, he usually begins with misrepresenting Dr Hutton's notions, and then proceeds to the refutation of them. In this imaginary contest, it will readily be supposed, that he is in general successful: when a man has the framing both of his own argument, and that of his antagonist, he must be a very unskilful logician if he does not come off with the advantage. 425. It is but justice, however, to the Neptunists, to acknowledge, that they are not all liable to the censure of beginning their researches from a period antecedent to the existence of the laws of nature. This absurdity does not, so far as I know, infect the system of Werner. That mineralogist has not proposed to explain the first origin of things, though he has supposed, at some former period, a condition of the globe very unlike the present, viz. the entire submersion of the solid under the fluid part. NOTE XXIV. § 129. _System of_ BUFFON. 426. The affinity of Dr Hutton's theory to that of Buffon, is nothing more than what arises from their making use of the same agents, viz. fire and water, in producing the present condition of the earth's surface. In almost all other respects the two theories are extremely different. The order in which those agents are employed in them, is directly opposite, as has already been remarked; Buffon introducing the action of fire first, and of water only in the second place, to waste and destroy mineral bodies, and afterwards to dispose them anew, and arrange them into strata. He makes no provision for the consolidation of these strata, nor any for their angular elevation; he has no means of explaining the unstratified rocks; nor any, but one extremely imperfect, for explaining the inequalities of the earth's surface. Again, Buffon mistook, in some degree, the true object of a theory of the earth; and though he did not go back, like the geologists just named, to a time when the laws of nature were not fully established, he begins from a condition of things too unlike the present to be the basis of any rational speculation. He does not, indeed, undertake to examine the state of our planetary system before the sun existed; for from such extravagance, even when most disposed to indulge his fancy, he would surely have revolted. But he treats of the world, when the earth and the planets had just ceased to be a part of the sun, and were newly detached from the body of that luminary.[231] [Footnote 231: According to Buffon, the granite is the true solar matter, unchanged but by its congelation.]