Patrin alleges to be acting in the interior parts of the most solid
bodies. This is indeed evident, that there has been a cause operating
in the internal parts of the most solid bodies, a cause by which the
elements, or constituent parts of those solid bodies, have been moved
and regularly disposed, as this author very well observes must have been
the case in our agates or eyed stones; but to ascribe to water this
effect, or to employ either an ineffectual or an unknown cause, is not
to reason philosophically with regard to the history of nature; it is to
reason phantastically, and to imagine fable.
M. Monnet has imagined a petrifying power in water very different
from any that has hitherto been conceived, I believe, by natural
philosophers, and I also believe, altogether inconsistent with
experience or matter of fact; but as it is not without good reason that
this naturalist has been induced to look out for a petrifying cause
different from any hitherto supposed, and as he has endeavoured very
properly to refute the systems of petrification hitherto received,
I would beg leave to transcribe his reasoning upon the subject in
corroboration of the present theory of consolidation by the means of
fusion.
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