the time attended the lectures of the potter, including
Ambrose Paré. Palissy charged a crown
(escu) for admission, and offered four crowns to
any one who would prove him to be wrong;
but, "thank God!" he says, "not a single man
ever contradicted a single word!"

Yet, two hundred years later, Voltaire, although
the most efficient in teaching the method
of the French Baconians, quarrelled with Buffon
on this very point. "The sport of nature has,"
he said, "imprinted upon stones an imperfect
resemblance to certain animals;" and then he
said, "The pilgrims must have let the shells fall
on their way to Rome or the Holy Land." Their
reconciliation was characteristic of both men.
Voltaire sent his submission to Buffon in the
form of a joke, who replied by a rounded period
of eulogium. "I won't," said the one, "remain
at variance with M. de Buffon for the shells;"
and the other replied, "I declare for the sake
of M. de Voltaire, of myself, and of posterity,
which I will not leave in doubt of the high
esteem I have always had of a man so rare, and
who is so great an honour to his age."

Stenon, in 1669, explained why marine shells
are found embedded in rocks which, instead of
lying flat, have been raised up. All sediments
are deposited horizontally, but when they have
consolidated, the agitations of the sea of central
fire upheaves and fractures them. All those
strange positions of the sedimentary strata are,
then, proofs of the existence of this great source
of terrestrial commotion.

Three-fourths of the surface of the globe being
covered with water, it follows that three-fourths
of the movements of the earth billows from the
commotions of central heat occur where there
are few observers to record them, and in circumstances
likely to deceive these few. Yet
many instances have been recorded, of which the
following is perhaps the most striking: On the
20th of October, 1687, Callao, the port of Lima,
was overwhelmed, with all its inhabitants, and
man and beast, for fifty leagues along the coast.
The rolling mountains of water carried ships
from the road of Callao a league up the country.
At the time, Captain Davis, the commander of
an English ship, was lying in his cabin, one hundred
and fifty leagues from the coast, when the
ship appeared to have struck upon a rock. The
guns leaped in their carriages, the sailors were
pitched out of their hammocks, and the captain
was thrown out of his cabin. In their bewilderment
and consternation every one began to prepare
for death. When their amazement was a
little over, they cast the lead and sounded, but
found no ground. The green sea had turned
whitish, and the water they took up in their
buckets was filled with sand: and again they
sounded for land, and again they found none.
They concluded that the shock they had suffered
must have come from an earthquake, but they
probably would never have published their experience,
if they had not heard of the calamity
of Callao.

The traces of uprisings and sinkings upon
coasts and mountains are innumerable, I shall
only, therefore, mention those which haunt my
imagination whenever I think on this subject.
Persons who have been ever so short a time
resident upon a rocky coast must be aware of
the existence of shell-fish, which penetrate the
rocks and live in the holes they make. There
are several genera and many species of these
shell-fish, but at present we have to do chiefly
with the lithodomus of Cuvier. These shells
are a group between the mussels and the arks.
Living in coast rocks, in limestone cliffs, and
being found in the pillars of the Temple of Serapis,
at Puteoli, they have furnished decisive
proofs of the changes of the level of sea-coasts
in modern times. Sir Charles Lyell, after a
personal examination of the district, found evidence
of no less than five changes of sea-level
during a period stretching from eighty years
before Christ to 1838. More than nineteen
hundred years ago, when the ancient mosaic
pavement was constructed, the sea-level was
twelve feet above the actual level. More than
eighteen hundred years ago it was still six feet
above the actual level. The level by the end of
the fourth century was nearly as low as it is at
present. In the middle ages, and prior to the
eruption of Monte Nuovo, the sea-level was
nineteen feet lower than in 1838; whilst in
the beginning of the century it stood at about
two feet two inches higher. When it was nineteen
feet lower than at present, the stone-piercers
(Lithodomi) lodged themselves within
the marble columns, and as they died some of
their unoccupied holes were taken possession of
by the sand-burrowing ark and wedgeshells
(Arca and Donax). No wonder the discovery of
such shells of the purple shore in marble columns,
from twelve to more than twenty feet up in the
air, has attracted the attention for so many years
of so many men of eminence in science!

ln Chambers's Ancient Sea Margins will be
found an accumulation of facts and observations
on the subject of sea-levels. This island, he
says, was once submerged at least seventeen
hundred feet. The result of his very extensive
observations Mr. Robert Chambers states to be,
that the superficial formations bear the marks
of former levels of the sea up to at least twelve
hundred feet. I can only ask my reader, with
this work as a manual, to take a glance at the
Carse of Gowrie in Scotland.

ln the Carse of Gowrie, where it is about
twenty feet above the adjacent firth at Polgavie,
there are, firstly, about twenty feet depth of
various clays, then a four-feet-thick bed of peat
extending under the sea, and containing alders
and birches standing as upright still as when
they grew in the blue clay at their roots. At
three different heights in the clays there are
vegetable roots cut off by layers of marine
shells, proving thus in all four recurrences of
the sea. The word "inch" in Gaelic signifies
island; when the Celts first arrived in the Carse
of Gowrie, the places must have, it is inferred,
been islands in a shallow firth, which are still
called Inchyra, Inchmichael, Inchmartin, Inchsture,
and Megginch. The minister of Errol