the globe is an oblate spheroid flattened at the poles, and this form we
know, by strict mathematical demonstrations, is precisely the one which a
fluid body revolving round its axis, and become solid at its surface by
the slow dissipation of its heat or other causes, would assume. I
suppose, therefore, that the globe, in the first state in which the
imagination can venture to consider it, was a fluid mass with an immense
atmosphere revolving in space round the sun, and that by its cooling a
portion of its atmosphere was condensed in water which occupied a part of
the surface. In this state no forms of life such as now belong to our
system could have inhabited it; and, I suppose, the crystalline rocks
(or, as they are called by geologists, the primary rocks), which contain
no vestiges of a former order of things, were the results of the first
consolidation on its surface. Upon the further cooling the water which
more or less had covered it contracted, depositions took place, shell-
fish and coral insects of the first creation began their labours, and
islands appeared in the midst of the ocean raised from the deep by the
productive energies of millions of zoophytes. Those islands became
covered with vegetables fitted to bear a high temperature, such as palms
and various species of plants similar to those which now exist in the
hottest parts of the world; and the submarine rocks or shores of these
new formations of land became covered with aquatic vegetables, on which
various species of shell-fish and common fishes found their nourishment.
The fluids of the globe in cooling deposited a large quantity of the
materials they held in solution, and these deposits agglutinating
together the sand, the immense masses of coral rocks, and some of the
remains of the shells and fishes found round the shores of the primitive
lands, produced the first order of secondary rocks. As the temperature
of the globe became lower, species of the oviparous reptiles were created
to inhabit it; and the turtle, crocodile, and various gigantic animals of
the sauri kind, seem to have haunted the bays and waters of the primitive