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The changes in the level of the waters have not, therefore, consisted solely in a more or less gradual, or more or less general retreat; there have been various successive irruptions and retreats, the final result of which, however, has been a universal depression of the level of the sea.

Proofs that these Revolutions have been sudden.

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It is of much importance to remark, that these repeated irruptions and retreats of the sea have neither all been slow nor gradual; on the contrary, most of the catastrophes which have occasioned them have been sudden; and this is especially easy to be proved, with regard to the last of these catastrophes, that which, by a two-fold motion, has inundated, and afterwards laid dry, our present continents, or at least a part of the land which forms them at the present day. In the northern regions, it has left the carcases of large quadrupeds which became enveloped in the ice, and have thus been preserved even to our own times, with their skin, their hair, and their flesh. If they had not been frozen as soon as killed, they would have been decomposed by putrefaction. And, on the other hand, this eternal frost could not previously have occupied the places in which they have been seized by it, for they could not have lived in such a temperature. It was, therefore, at one and the same moment that these animals were destroyed, and the country which they inhabited became covered with ice. This event has been sudden, instantaneous, without any gradation; and what is so clearly demonstrated with respect to this last catastrophe, is not less so with reference to those which have preceded it. The breaking to pieces, the raising up and overturning of the older strata, leave no doubt upon the mind that they have been reduced to the state in which we now see them, by the action of sudden and violent causes; and even the force of the motions excited in the mass of waters, is still attested by the heaps of debris and rounded pebbles which are in many places interposed between the solid strata. Life, therefore, has often been disturbed on this earth by terrible events. Numberless living beings have been the victims of these catastrophes; some, which inhabited the dry land, have been swallowed up by inundations; others, which peopled the waters, have been laid dry, from the bottom of the sea having been suddenly raised; their very races have been extinguished for ever, and have left no other memorial of their existence than some fragments, which the naturalist can scarcely recognize.

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