CHAP. VII.
Opinions examined with regard to Petrifaction, or Mineral Concretion.
The ideas of naturalists with regard to petrifaction are so vague and
indistinct, that no proper answer can be given to them. They in general
suppose water to be the solvent of bodies, and the vehicle of petrifying
substances; but they neither say whether water be an universal
menstruum, nor do they show in what manner a solid body has been formed
in the bowels of the earth, from that solution. It may now be proper to
examine this subject, not with a view to explain all those petrifactions
of bodies which is performed in the mineral regions of the earth, those
regions that are inaccessible to man, but to show that what has been
wrote by naturalists, upon this subject, has only a tendency to corrupt
science, by admitting the grossest supposition in place of just
principle or truth, and to darken natural history by introducing an ill
conceived theory in place of matter of fact.
M. le Comte de Buffon has attempted to explain the crystallization
of bodies, or production of mineral forms, by the accretion or
juxtaposition of elementary bodies, which have only form in two
dimensions, length and breadth; that is to say, that mineral concretions
are composed of surfaces alone, and not of bodies.
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