Excerpt from Journal of a Tour and Residence in Great Britain, During the Years 1810 and 1811, by a French Traveller, Vol. 2: With Remarks on the Country, Its Arts, Literature, and Politics and on the Manners and Customs of Its Inhabitants The solid crust of our globe is formed of rocks in great irregular masses, as granite, and of hard substances, arranged in beds parallel to each other. The latter are composed of frag ments of other rocks more or less broken and attenuated, united by a common cement, as sand stone, for instance, - of hardened earths, or of calcareous substances, containing Often shells and bones, as well as remains of known and unknown plants and fruits. Fossile coals, with indications of vegetable substances in their formation, form some of these beds and, finally, sea salt is found also in alternate and parallel strata. These, and many other appearances, afford irresistible evi deuces ofthe mode of formation of stratified rocks. Rains and torrents, frost and moisture, are constant ly wasting the surface of the continents to an ex tent, proved, by incontrovertible facts, to be won derfully great. Ivir Playfair very justly compares such insulated mountains as shew, by the undis turbed horizontality of their strata, that they re tain their original level, to the pillars of earth which workmen leave behind them, to afford a measure of the whole quantity of earth which they have removed. The apparent slowness of the progress affords no presumption against its reality, and only marks the comparative evanes cence of our own duration. The materials ofthe surface of continents, and of their shores, are thus incessantly washed away into the ocean. And form. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.