Now, whoever admits this principle, and reasons on it consistently, without being afraid to follow it through all its consequences, must unavoidably come very close to the Huttonian theory. He must see, that a power which, acting from below, produced this great effect can never have belonged to water, unless rarefied into steam by the application of heat. But if it be once admitted that heat resides in the mineral regions, the great objection to Dr Hutton's system is removed; and the theorist, who was furnished with so active and so powerful an agent, would be very unskilful in the management of his own resources, if he did not employ it in the work of consolidating as well as in that of raising up the strata. A little attention will show, that it is qualified for both purposes; though insuperable objections must, no doubt, offer themselves, where the effects of compression are not understood. We may safely conclude, then, that the accurate and ingenious Geologist of Geneva ought to have been a _Plutonist_, in order to give consistency to the principles which he had adopted, and to make them coalesce as parts of one and the same system. If he embraced an opposite opinion, it probably was from feeling the force of those objections that arise from our discovering nothing in the bowels of the earth like the remains left by combustion, or inflammation, at its surface. The secret by which these seeming contradictions are to be reconciled, was unknown to this mineralogist, and he has accordingly decided strongly against the action of fire, even in the case of those unstratified substances that have the greatest affinity to volcanic lava. 454. The theoretical conclusions of another accurate and skilful observer, Dolomieu, furnish a still more remarkable example of a tendency to union between systems professedly hostile to one another.