hill and over this landscape, the billows of the ocean have rolled in wild and dreadful fury, while the leviathan, the whale and all the monsters of the deep, have disported themselves amid the fearful tempest.

Where was then the shore of the ocean?

From this place, for eighty miles to the westward, the ascent of the country is very gradual; to and even up the Blue Ridge, marine shells and other phenomena are found, which demonstrate that that country too, has been visited by the ocean. How then has it emer

whether he is to be considered as one of our own citizens disposed to entertain the people of Richmond and its vici. nity with a light and amusing speculation on the origin of their country, in either instance it was both more natural, and more interesting that the speculation should appear to have grown out of recent facts discovered in their own town or neighbourhood, and with which they are all supposed to be conversant, than on distant and controvertible facts, which it was not important to the inquiry, whether they knew or believed, or not.

ged? Has it been by a sudden convulsion? Certainly not. No observing man, who has ever travelled from the Blue Ridge to the Atlantick, can doubt that this immersion has been effected by very slow gradations. For as you advance to the east, the proofs of the former submersion of the country thicken upon you. On the shores of York river, the bones of whales abound; and I have been not a little amused in walking on the sand beach of that river during the recess of the tide, and looking up at the high cliff or bank above me, to observe strata of sea shells not yet calcined, like those which lay on the beach under my feet, interspersed with strata of earth (the joint result no doubt of sand and putrid vegetables) exhibiting at once a sample of the manner in which the adjacent soil had been formed, and proof of the comparatively recent desertion of the waters.

Upon the whole, every thing here tends to

confirm the ingenious theory of Mr. Buffon: that the eastern coasts of continents are enlarged by the perpetual revolution of the earth from west to east, which has the obvious tendency to conglomerate the loose sands of the sea on the eastern coast; while the tides of the ocean, drawn from east to west, against the revolving earth, contribute to aid the process, and hasten the alluvion. But admitting the Abbé Raynal's idea, that America is a far younger country than either of the other continents, or in other words, that America has emerged long since their formation, how did it happen that the materials, which compose this continent, were not accumulated on the eastern coast of Asia? Was it, that the present mountains of America, then protuberances on the bed of the ocean, intercepted a part of the passing sands which would otherwise have been washed on the Asiatic shore, and thus became the rudiments

of this vast continent? If so, America is under much greater obligations to her barren mountains, than she has hitherto supposed.

But while Mr. Buffon's theory accounts

very handsomely for the enlargement of the eastern coast, it offers no kind of reason for any extension of the western; on the contrary, the very causes assigned, to supply the addition to the eastern, seem at first view to threaten a diminution of the western coast. Accordingly, Mr. Buffon, we see has adopted also the latter idea; and, in the constant abluvion from the western coast of one continent, has found a perennial source of materials for the eastern coast of that which lies behind it. This last idea, however, by no means quadrates with the hypothesis, that the mountains of America formed the original stamina of the continent; for, on the latter supposition, the mountains themselves would constitute the western coast; since Mr. Buf

fon's theory precludes the idea of any accession in that quarter. But the mountains do not constitute the western coast. On the contrary, there is a wider extent of country between the great mountains in North America, and the pacific or the northern oceans, than there is between the same mountains and the Atlantick ocean. Mr. Buffon's theory, therefore, however rational as to the eastern, becomes defective, as he presses it, in relation to the western, coast; unless, to accommodate the theory, we suppose the total abrasion of some great mountain which originally constituted the western limit, and which was, itself, the embryon of this continent. But for many reasons, and particularly the present contiguity to Asia, at one part, where such a mountain, according to the hypothesis, must have run, the idea of any such limit will be thought rather too extravagant for adoption. The fact is, that Mr. Buffon has considered