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be propped up without a miracle; and I undertake, with the assistance of Moro, to explain to you how these marine animals were transported into the mountains by natural causes."[78]
A brief abstract then follows of Moro's theory, by which, says Generelli, we may explain all the phenomena, as Vallisneri so ardently desired, "without violence, without fictions, without hypothesis, without miracles."[79] The Carmelitan then proceeds to struggle against an obvious objection to Moro's system, considered as a method of explaining the revolutions of the earth, naturally. If earthquakes have been the agents of such mighty changes, how does it happen that their effects since the times of history have been so inconsiderable? This same difficulty had, as we have seen, presented itself to Hooke, half a century before, and forced him to resort to a former "crisis of nature:" but Generelli defended his position by showing how numerous were the accounts of eruptions and earthquakes, of new islands, and of elevations and subsidences of land, and yet how much greater a number of like events must have been unattested and unrecorded during the last six thousand years. He also appealed to Vallisneri as an authority to prove that the mineral masses containing shells, bore, upon the whole, but a small proportion to those rocks which were destitute of organic remains; and the latter, says the learned monk, might have been created as they now exist, in the beginning.
Generelli then describes the continual waste of mountains and continents, by the action of rivers and torrents, and concludes with these eloquent and original observations:--"Is it possible that this waste should have continued for six thousand, and perhaps a greater number of years, and that the mountains should remain so great, unless their ruins have been repaired? Is it credible that the Author of Nature should have founded the world upon such laws, as that the dry land should forever be growing smaller, and at last become wholly submerged beneath the waters? Is it credible that, amid so many created things, the mountains alone should daily diminish in number and bulk, without there being any repair of their losses? This would be contrary to that order of Providence which is seen to reign in all other things in the universe. Wherefore I deem it just to conclude, that the same cause which, in the beginning of time, raised mountains from the abyss, has down to the present day continued to produce others, in order to restore from time to time the losses of all such as sink down in different places, or are rent asunder, or in other way suffer disintegration. If this be admitted, we can easily understand why there should now be found upon many mountains so great a number of crustacea and other marine animals."
In the above extract, I have not merely enumerated the opinions and facts which are confirmed by recent observation, suppressing all that has since proved to be erroneous, but have given a faithful abridgment of the entire treatise, with the omission only of Moro's hypothesis, which Generelli adopted, with all its faults and excellences. The reader will therefore remark, that although this admirable essay embraces so large a portion of the principal objects of geological research, it makes no allusion to the extinction of certain classes of animals; and it is evident that no opinions on this head had, at that time, gained a firm footing in Italy. That Lister and other English naturalists should long before have declared in favor of the loss of species, while Scilla and most of his countrymen hesitated, was perhaps natural, since the Italian museums were filled with fossil shells belonging to species of which a great portion did actually exist in the Mediterranean; whereas the English collectors could obtain no recent species from such of their own strata as were then explored.