But, if this author may be blamed for wanting the temper, or neglecting the rules, of philosophic investigation, he is hardly less culpable, for having so slightly considered the scope and spirit of a work which he condemned so freely. In that work, instead of finding the world represented as the result of necessity or chance, which might be looked for, if the accusations of atheism or impiety were well founded, we see every where the utmost attention to discover, and the utmost disposition to admire, the instances of wise and beneficent design manifested in the structure, or economy of the world. The enlarged views of these, which his geological system afforded, appeared to Dr Hutton himself as its most valuable result. They were the parts of it which he contemplated with greatest delight; and he would have been less flattered, by being told of the ingenuity and originality of his theory, than of the addition which it had made to our knowledge of _final causes_. It was natural, therefore, that he should be hurt by an attempt to accuse him of opinions, so different from those which he had always taught; and if he answered Mr Kirwan's attack with warmth or asperity, we must ascribe it to the indignation excited by unmerited reproach. 120. But to return to the natural history of the earth: Though there be in it no _data_, from which the commencement of the present order can be ascertained, there are many by which the existence of that order may be traced back to an antiquity extremely remote. The beds of primitive schistus, for instance, contain sand, gravel, and other materials, collected, as already shown, from the dissolution of mineral bodies; which bodies, therefore, must have existed long before the oldest part of the present land was formed. Again, in this gravel we sometimes find pieces of sandstone, and of other compound rocks, by which we are of course carried back a step farther, so as to reach a system of things, from which the present is the third in succession; and this may be considered as the most ancient epocha, of which any memorial exists in the records of the fossil kingdom. 121. Next in the order of time to the consolidation of the primary strata, we must place their elevation, when, from being horizontal, and at the bottom of the sea, they were broken, set on edge, and raised to the surface. It is even probable, as formerly observed, that to this succeeded a depression of the same strata, and a second elevation, so that they have twice visited the superior, and twice the inferior regions. During the second immersion, were formed, first, the great bodies of pudding-stone, that in so many instances lie immediately above them; and next were deposited the strata that are strictly denominated secondary.