This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1854 edition. Excerpt: ...changes. At one period they.rear their lofty summits to the skies; at another no longer exist Thus is every production of nature unstable, and siijrject to perpetual variations. Nor do such vast revolutions testify only a boundless lapse of time. Other important and instructive lessons they hold up to the contemplation of mankind. Substances that we meet with the farthest from the Prodigious variety of such curious productions are.in different museums throughout the whole of Europe, surface of the earth, carry with them the visible impressions of animated existence, and of progressive or gradual formation. In short, that the world should have thus been agitated in unobserved confusion, is the most unnatural of suppositions. On every such occasion the human, species evidently must have been present. Nor is it by any means reasonable to suppose that mankind have existed in any considerable degree more numerous at any one period than at another. Ever have they fluctuated in their population, or increase and decrease, either as art or nature have afforded them more or less of the means of subsistence, That vegetables and fishes were in being in the very remotest antiquity, their obvious remains in every species of stone, at the very bottoms of mountains, and in each country of the globe, strikingly demonstrate. And of the equally remote existence of animals in general, circumstances may be brought which are unquestionably conclusive. The existence of vegetables and fishes, already explained, would have been the strongest presumptive proofs of this; but we also find, that in each quarter of the world the remains of the human species, and those of a vast variety of animals, are everywhere met with in a fossil state. The situations in which...