When Maillet first promulgated his hypothesis, many of the departments of natural history existed as mere regions of fable and romance; and, in addressing himself to the Muscadins of Paris, in a popular work as wild and amusing as a fairy tale, he could safely take the liberty, and he did take it very freely, of exaggerating the marvellous, and adding fresh fictions to the untrue. And in preparing them for his theory of the metamorphoses of a marine into a terrestrial vegetation, he set himself, in accordance with his general character, to show that really the transmutation did not amount to much. “I know you have resided a long time,” his Indian Philosopher is made to say, “at Marseilles. Now, you can bear me witness, that the fishermen there daily find in their nets, and among their fish, plants of a hundred kinds, with their fruits still upon them; and though these fruits are not so large and so well nourished as those of our earth, yet the species of these plants is in no other respect dubious. They there find clusters of white and black grapes, peachtrees, pear-trees, prune-trees, apple-trees, and all sorts of flowers. When in that city, I saw, in the cabinet of a curious gentleman, a prodigious number of those sea-productions of different qualities, especially of rose-trees, which had their roses very red when they came out of the sea.