in Natural History, denotes, in general, every thing dug out of the earth, whether it be a native thereof, as metals, stones, salts, earths, and other minerals; or extraneous, repotted in the bowels of the earth by some extraordinary means, as earthquakes, the deluge, &c.

Native fossils are substances found in the earth, or on its surface, of a simple structure, exhibiting no appearances of organization; and these are included under the general names of simple and compound, earthy or metallic minerals. See MINERALOGY.

Extraneous fossils are bodies of the vegetable or animal kingdoms accidentally buried in the earth. Of the vegetable kingdom, there are principally three kinds; trees or parts of them, herbaceous plants, and corals: and of the animal kingdom there are four kinds; sea shells, the teeth or bony palates and bones of fishes, complete fishes, and the bones of land animals. See GEOLOGY.

These adventitious or extraneous fossils, thus found buried in great abundance in divers parts of the earth, have employed the curiosity of several of our latest naturalists, who have each their several system to account for the surprising appearances of petrified sea fishes, in places far remote from the sea, and on the tops of mountains; shells in the middle of quarries of stone; and of elephants teeth, and bones of divers animals, peculiar to the southern climates, and plants only growing in the east, found fossil in our northern and western parts.

Some will have these shells, &c. to be real stones, and stone plants, formed after the usual manner of other figured stones; of which opinion is the learned Dr Lister.

Another opinion is, that these fossil shells, with all the foreign bodies found within the earth, as bones, trees, plants, &c. were buried therein at the time of the universal deluge; and that, having been penetrated either by the bituminous matter abounding chiefly in watery places, or by the salts of the earth, they have been preserved entire, and sometimes petrified.

Others think, that those shells, found at the tops of the highest mountains, could never have been carried thither by the waters, even of the deluge; inasmuch as most of these aquatic animals, on account of the weight of their shells, always remain at the bottom of the water, and never move but close along the ground. They imagine, that a year's continuance of the waters of the deluge, intermixed with the salt waters of the sea, upon the surface of the earth, might well give occasion to the production of shells of divers kinds in different