In fine, in order to destroy the credibility of the Noachian deluge, the brilliant Frenchman exhausted every expedient in his attempts to neutralize that Palæontologic evidence on which geologists now found some of their most legitimate conclusions. But he only succeeded, instead, in producing compositions of which every sentence contains either an absurdity or an untruth, and in raising a reaction against the special school of infidelity which he had founded, that at length bore it down. He wrote in the middle of the Paris basin, with its multitude of fossil shells and bones; and, when penning his article for the Encyclopædia, he had, he tells us, a boxful of the shell-charged soil of the Faluns of Touraine actually before him; but the deluge had to be put down, whatever the nature or bearing of the facts; and so he could find in either no evidence of a time when the sea had covered the land. He found, instead, only "some mussels, because there were ponds in the neighborhood." As for the "spiral petrifactions termed _cornu ammonis_," of which the Jurassic Alps are full, they were not nautili, he said; they could be nothing else than reptiles; seeing that reptiles take almost always the form of a spiral when not in motion; and it was surely more likely, that when petrified they should still retain the spiral disposition, than that "the Indian Ocean should have long ago overflowed the mountains of Europe." Were there not, however, real shells of the Syrian type in France and Italy? Perhaps so. But ought "we not to recollect," he asked, "the numberless bands of pilgrims who carried their money to the Holy Land, and brought back shells? or was it preferable to think that the sea of Joppa and Sidon had covered Burgundy and Milanais?" As for the seeming shells of the less superficial deposits, "Are we sure," he inquired, "that the soil of the earth cannot produce fossils?" Agate in some specimens contains its apparent sprigs of moss, which, we know, never existed as the vegetable they resemble; and why should not the earth have, in like manner, produced its apparent shells? Or are not many of these shells mere lake or river petrifactions?--one never sees among them "true marine substances"!! "If there _were_ any, why have we never seen bones of sea dogs, sharks, and whales?"!!! And thus he ran on, in the belief apparently that he had to deal with but an ignorant priesthood, too little acquainted with the facts to make out a case against him in behalf of the Mosaic narrative, and whom at least, should argument fail him, he could vanquish with a joke.