Hutton answered Kirwan's attacks with great warmth, and with the indignation justly excited by unmerited reproach. "He had always displayed," says Playfair, "the utmost disposition to admire the beneficent design manifested in the structure of the world; and he contemplated with delight those parts of his theory which made the greatest additions to our knowledge of final causes." We may say with equal truth, that in no scientific works in our language can more eloquent passages be found, concerning the fitness, harmony, and grandeur of all parts of the creation, than in those of Playfair. They are evidently the unaffected expressions of a mind, which contemplated the study of nature, as best calculated to elevate our conceptions of the attributes of the First Cause. At any other time the force and elegance of Playfair's style must have insured popularity to the Huttonian doctrines; but by a singular coincidence, Neptunianism and orthodoxy were now associated in the same creed; and the tide of prejudice ran so strong, that the majority were carried far away into the chaotic fluid, and other cosmological inventions of Werner. These fictions the Saxon professor had borrowed with little modification, and without any improvement, from his predecessors. They had not the smallest foundation either in Scripture or in common sense, and were probably approved of by many as being so ideal and unsubstantial, that they could never come into violent collision with any preconceived opinions. According to De Luc, the first essential distinction to be made between the various phenomena exhibited on the surface of the earth was, to determine which were the results of causes still in action, and which had been produced by causes that had ceased to act. The form and composition of the mass of our continents, he said, and their existence above the level of the sea, must be ascribed to causes no longer in action. These continents emerged, at no very remote period, on the sudden retreat of the ocean, the waters of which made their way into subterranean caverns. The formation of the rocks which enter into the crust of the earth began with the precipitation of granite from a primordial liquid, after which other strata containing the remains of organized bodies were deposited, till at last the present sea remained as the residuum of the primordial liquid, and no longer continued to produce mineral strata.[118]