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Updated: May 5, 2025
M. de Luc has given us his ideas of petrifaction with sufficient precision of term and clearness of expression; his opinion, therefore, deserves to be examined; and, as his theory of petrifaction is equally applicable to every species of substance, it is necessary again to examine this subject, notwithstanding of what has been already said, in the first part of this work, concerning consolidation and mineral concretion from the fluid state of fusion.
Were it possible to deny that truth, the very formation of stalactite, that operation which has bewildered naturalists, would prove it; for it is upon the general solubility of calcareous matter exposed to water that those cavities are formed, in which may be found such collections of stalactical concretion; and the general tendency of those operations is to waste the calcareous bodies through which water percolates.
In soft clays concretions may, as they grow, press the clay aside. In many other rocks concretions are made by the process of REPLACEMENT. Molecule by molecule the rock is removed and the mineral of the concretion substituted in its place. The concretion may in this way preserve intact the lamination lines or other structures of the rock.
The idea of the sun is a much later product, and the real sun is so far from being an original datum from which roundness is abstracted, that it is an ulterior and quite ideal construction, a spatial concretion into which the logical concretion roundness enters as a prior and independent factor.
All this is to be believed with faith, whatever counsels reason may give us. And now we are about to see what practical consequences all these more or less fantastical doctrines may have in regard to logic, to esthetics, and, above all, to ethics their religious concretion, in a word.
These layers, beginning at the bottom, are as follows; igneous granite, unstratified; limestone laid down from life in the ocean, metamorphosed by heat and all fossils thereby destroyed; limestone highly crystallized, composed of fossil shells and very hard; sandstone, made under the sea from previous rock powdered, having huge concretionary masses with a shell or a pebble as a nucleus around which the concretion has taken place; shale from the sea also; conglomerate, or drift, deposited by ice in the famous glacial cold snap; alluvium soil deposited in fresh water and composed partly of organic matter.
The commonest of the giant clams TRIDACNA GIGAS sometimes betrays evidence of past internal trouble by the presence of a concretion of porcelain whiteness and of porcellaneous texture, but such are not to be described as pearls and to be prized as rarities only.
For he affirms that the statement of Democritus that the atoms are to the senses color by a certain human law or ordinance, that they are by the same law sweetness, and by the same law concretion is at war with our senses, and that he who uses this reason and persists in this opinion cannot himself imagine whether he is living or dead.
Whatever may be the difficulty of explaining those particular appearances by means of fusion and mechanical force, it is plainly impossible to conceive those bodies formed in those places by infiltration, or any manner of concretion from a state of solution.
Such a living concretion of similars succeeding one another in time, is the idea of a nature or quality, the universal falsely supposed to be an abstraction from physical objects, which in truth are conceived by putting together these very ideas into a spatial and permanent system. Here we have, if I am not mistaken, the origin of the two terms most prominent in human knowledge, ideas and things.
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