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rocks in the neighbourhood of Heidelberg ,was owing, he conceived, to the depositionshaving been disturbed by the great val-leys of the Rhine and the Neckar . ThoughLara an on thought that currents were ratherthe effect of valleys than the cause of them,even He, has not always distinguished theprocess by which strata were formed fromthat by which they were mutilated ; andDolomieu * furnishes, in one of his bestmemoirs, an example of that unfortu-nate association of order and confusion,which, for want of correct notions onthe subject, he has ventured to ascribe tonature.

If this event was posterior to the conso-lidation of the most recent rocks, it was ob-viously posterior also to the interment ofthe fossil organic bodies which these rockscontain.

Woodward, Scheuchzer, Buttner, Leh-man, and the pupils of Hutchinson, attri-buted fossil shells to the deluge, as the

* Journal de Physique, vol. xxxix. p. 391.N 2