He restricts the term "fossils" to vegetable and animal remains, since the word in his time was by some loosely applied to minerals as well as fossils; to anything dug out of the earth.

"We find fossils," he says, "on dry land, even in the middle of continents and large islands; and not only in places far removed from the sea, but even on mountains and in their bowels, at considerable heights, each part of the earth's surface having at some time been a veritable ocean bottom." He then quotes at length accounts of such instances from Buffon, and notices their prodigious number, and that while the greater number are marine, others are fresh-water and terrestrial shells, and the marine shells may be divided into littoral and pelagic.
"This distinction is very important to make, because the consideration of fossils is, as we have already said, one of the principal means of knowing well the revolutions which have taken place on the surface of our globe.

This subject is of great importance, and under this point of view it should lead naturalists to study fossil shells, in order to compare them with their analogues which we can discover in the sea; finally, to carefully seek the places where each species lives, the banks which are formed of them, the different beds which these banks may present, etc., etc., so that we do not believe it out of place to insert here the principal considerations which have already resulted from that which is known in this respect.
"_The fossils which are found in the dry parts of the surface of the globe are evident indications of a long sojourn of the sea in the very places where we observe them._" Under this heading, after repeating the statement previously made that fossils occur in all parts of the dry land, in the midst of the continents and on high mountains, he inquires _by what cause_ so many marine shells could be found in the explored parts of the world.

Discarding the old idea that they are monuments of the deluge, transformed into fossils, he denies that there was such a general catastrophe as a universal deluge, and goes on to say in his assured, but calm and philosophic way: "On the globe which we inhabit, everything is submitted to continual and inevitable changes, which result from the essential order of things: they take place, in truth, with more or less promptitude or slowness, according to the nature, the condition, or the situation of the objects; nevertheless they are wrought in some time or other.
"To nature, time is nothing, and it never presents a difficulty; she always has it at her disposal, and it is for her a means without limit, with which she has made the greatest as well as the least things.
"The changes to which everything in this world is subjected are changes not only of form and of nature, but they are changes also of bulk, and even of situation.
"All the considerations stated in the preceding chapters should convince us that nothing on the surface of the terrestrial globe is immutable.

They teach us that the vast ocean which occupies so great a part of the surface of our globe cannot have its bed constantly fixed in the same place; that the dry or exposed parts of this surface themselves undergo perpetual changes in their condition, and that they are in turn successively invaded and abandoned by the sea.
"There is, indeed, every evidence that these enormous masses of water continually displace themselves, both their bed and their limits.
"In truth these displacements, which are never interrupted, are in general only made with extreme and almost inappreciable slowness, but they are in ceaseless operation, and with such constancy that the ocean bottom, which necessarily loses on one side while it gains on another, has already, without doubt, spread over not only once, but even several times, every point of the surface of the globe.
"If it is thus, if each point of the surface of the terrestrial globe has been in turn dominated by the seas--that is to say, has contributed to form the bed of those immense masses of water which constitute the ocean--it should result (1) that the insensible but uninterrupted transfer of the bed of the ocean over the whole surface of the globe has given place to deposits of the remains of marine animals which we should find in a fossil state; (2) that this translation of the ocean basin should be the reason why the dry portions of the earth are always more elevated than the level of the sea; so that the old ocean bed should become exposed without being elevated above the sea, and without consequently giving rise to the formation of mountains which we observe in so many different regions of the naked parts of our globe." Thus littoral shells of many genera, such as Pectens, Tellinae, cockle shells, turban shells (_sabots_), etc., madrepores and other littoral polyps, the bones of marine or of amphibious animals which have lived near the sea, and which occur as fossils, are then unimpeachable monuments of the sojourn of the sea on the points of the dry parts of the globe where we observe their deposits, and besides these occur deep-water forms.