Note 24 — PETER KALM’s TRAVELS. (continued 2)

Mr. Bartram thought that some peculiar attention should be paid to another thing relating to these observations. The shells which are to be found petrified on the northern mountains, are of such kinds as at present are not to be got in the sea, in the same latitude, and they are not fished on the shore, till you come to South Carolina. Mr. Bartram from hence took an occasion to defend Dr. Thomas Burnet’s opinion, that the earth before the deluge was in a different position towards the sun. He likewise asked whether the great bones which are sometimes found in the ground in Siberia, and which are supposed to be elephant’s bones and tusks, did not confirm this opinion. For at present those animals cannot live in such cold countries; but if according to Dr. Burnet, the sun once formed different zones about our earth, from those it now makes, the elephant may easily be supposed to have lived in Siberia.24 However it seems that all which we have hitherto mentioned, may have been the effect of different causes. To those belong the universal deluge, the increase of land which is merely the work of time, and the changes of the course of rivers, which when the snow melts and in great floods, leave their first beds, and form new ones.