Here is a distinct view of this part of nature; a view in which the present state of things plainly indicates what has passed, without our being obliged to raise our imagination to so high a pitch as is sometimes required, when we take the mountains themselves, instead of these blocks, as steps of the investigation. Here is a view, therefore, that must convince the most scrupulous, or jealous with regard to the admitting of theory, first, that those mountains had been much higher; secondly, that they had been degraded in their present place; thirdly, that this continent has subsisted in its present place for a very long space of time, during the slow progress of those imperceptible operations; and, lastly, that much of the solid parts of this earth has been thus travelled by the waters to the sea, after serving the purpose of soil upon the surface of the land. But though M. Hassenfratz has thus given us a most satisfactory view of the natural history of those blocks of stone which are now upon or near their native place, this will not explain other appearances of the same kind, where such blocks are found at great distances from their native places, in situations where the means of their transportation is not to be immediately perceived, such as those resting upon the Jura and Saleve, and where blocks of different kinds of stone are collected together. These last examples are the records of something still more distant in the natural history of this earth; and they give us a more extensive view of those operations by which the surface of this earth is continually changing. It is, however, extremely interesting to this Theory of the Earth, to have so distinctly ascertained some of those first steps by which we are to ascend in taking the more distant prospect; and these observations of M. Hassenfratz answer this end most completely.