had not assumed their present state, and consequently that there is not one of them, which can have existed, where they now are, for ever. The Mineralogist has ascertained that Granite is a compound substance, made up of three distinct and dissimilar simple mineral bodies, Quartz, Felspar, and Mica, each presenting certain regular combinations of external form and internal structure, with physical properties peculiar to itself. And Chemical Analysis has shown that these several bodies are made up of other bodies, all of which had a prior existence in some more simple state, before they entered on their present union in the mineral constituents of what are supposed to be the most ancient rocks accessible to human observation. The Crystallographer also has further shown that the several ingredients of Granite, and of all other kinds of Crystalline Rocks are composed of Molecules which are invisibly minute, and that each of these Molecules is made up of still smaller and more simple Molecules, every one of them combined in fixed and definite proportions, and affording at all the successive stages of their analysis, presumptive proof that they possess determinate geometrical figures. These combinations and figures are so far from indicating the fortuitous result of accident, that they are disposed according to laws the most severely rigid, and in proportions mathematically exact[1]
The Atheistical Theory assuming the gratuitous postulate of the eternity of matter and motion would represent the question thus. All matter, it would contend, must of necessity have assumed some form or other, and therefore may
- ↑ The above Paragraphs of this Chapter excepting the first, are taken almost verbatim from the Author's MS. Notes of his Lectures on Mineralogy, bearing the date of June 1822, and he has adhered more closely to the form under which they appear, than he might otherwise have done, for the sake of showing that no part of them has been suggested by any recent publications; and that the views here taken have not originated in express considerations called forth by the occasion of the present Treatise, but are the natural result of ordinary serious attention to the phenomena of Geology and Mineralogy, viewed in their conjoint relations to one another, and of inquiry pursued a few steps further beyond the facts towards the causes in which they originated.
