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Whence comes it, then, that there should be so much contrariety in the solutions of the same problem, that are given by men who proceed upon the same principles? May not this have been occasioned by the conditions of the problem never having been all taken into consideration at once; by which it has remained hitherto indeterminate, and susceptible of many solutions,—all equally good, when such or such conditions are abstracted; and all equally bad, when a new condition comes to be known, or when the attention is directed to some condition which had been formerly neglected?

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To quit the language of mathematics, it may be asserted, that almost all the authors of these systems, confining their attention to certain difficulties which struck them more forcibly than others, have endeavoured to solve these in a manner more or less plausible, and have left unnoticed others, equally numerous, and equally important. For example, the only difficulty with one consisted in explaining the changes that had taken place in the level of the sea; with another, it consisted in accounting for the solution of all terrestrial substances in one and the same menstruum; and with a third, in shewing how animals that were believed to be natives of the torrid zone could live in the frigid zone. Exhausting all the powers of the mind upon these questions, they conceived that they had done every thing that was necessary when they had contrived some method of answering them; and yet, while they neglected all the other phenomena, they did not always think of determining with precision the measure and limits of those which they had endeavoured to explain.