nature; so that they but retard for a while the progress by which they
are all resolved into dust, and sooner or later committed to the bosom of the
deep.
117. We are not, however, to imagine, that there is no where any
means of repairing this waste; for, on comparing the conclusion at which
we are now arrived, viz. that the present continents are all going to
decay, and their materials defending into the ocean, with the proposition
first laid down, that there same continents are composed of materials
which must have been collected from the decay of former rocks, it is
impossible not to recognize two corresponding steps of the same progress;
of a progress, by which mineral substances are subjected to the same
series of changes, and alternately wasted away and renovated. In the
same manner, as the present mineral substances derive their origin from
substances similar to themselves; so from the land now going to decay,
the sand and gravel forming on the sea-shore, or in the beds of rivers;
from the shells and corals which in such enormous quantities are every
day accumulated in the bosom of the sea; from the drift wood, and the
multitude of vegetable and animal remains continually deposited in the
ocean; from all these we cannot doubt, that strata are now forming in
those regions, to which
which nature seems to have
confined the powers of mineral reproduction; from which, after being consolidated,
they are again destined to emerge, and to exhibit a series of changes similar
to the past*.
118. How often these vicissitudes of decay and renovation have been
repeated, is not for us to determine; they constitute a series, of which,
as the author of this theory has remarked, we neither fee the beginning
nor the end; a circumstance that accords well with what is known concerning
other parts of the economy of the world. In the continuation of the
different species of animals and vegetables that inhabit the earth,
we discern neither a beginning nor an end; and, in the planetary motions,
where geometry has carried the eye so far both into the future and the
past, we discover no mark, either of the commencement or the termination
of the present order+. It is unreasonable, indeed, to suppose, that
such marks should any where exit. The Author of nature has not given
laws to the universe, which, like the institutions of men, carry in
themselves the elements of their own destruction. He has not permitted,
in his works, any symptom of infancy or of old age, or any sign by which
we may estimate either their future or their past duration. He may put
an end, as he no doubt gave a beginning,
H 4
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* NOTE XIX. +
NOTE XX.
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