hath made a description of those regions; feigning the nymph Cyrene, to send for her son to come down to her, and make her a visit in those shades where mortals were not admitted.

Come lead the youth below, bring him to me,

The Gods are pleas'd our mansions he should see;
Straight she commands the floods to make him way,
They open their wide bosom and obey;
Soft is the path, and easy is his tread,
A wat❜ry arch bends o'er his dewy head;
And as he goes, he wonders and looks round,
To see this new-found kingdom under ground.
The silent lakes in hollow caves he sees,
And on their banks an echoing grove of trees;
The fall of waters 'mongst the rocks below
He hears, and sees the rivers how they flow:
All the great rivers of the earth are there,
Prepar'd, as in a womb, by Nature's care.

Last, to his mother's bed-chamber he's brought,

Where the high roof with pumice-stone is wrought, &c."

Virgil.

It is a principal object with our author to prove the world as it at present exists-a mere heap of ruins. For this purpose he examines the different parts of its surface with much liveliness and ingenuity, and sometimes ascends into sublimity.

Of the

ocean, he

says

"That vast and prodigious cavity that runs quite round the globe, and reacheth, for ought we know, from pole to pole, and in many places is unsearchably deep. When I present this great gulph to my imagination, emptied of all its waters, naked and gaping at the sun, stretching its jaws from one end of the earth to another, it appears to me the most ghastly thing in nature. What hands or instruments could work a trench in the body of the earth of this vastness, and lay mountains and rocks on the side of it, as ramparts to enclose it?"

Again

"The shores and coasts of the sea are no way equal or uniform, but go in a line uncertainly crooked and broke; indented and jagged as a thing torn, as you may see in the maps of the coasts and the seacharts; and yet there are innumerable more inequalities than are taken notice of in those draughts; for they only mark the greater promontories and bays; but there are besides those, a multitude of creeks and outlets, necks of land and angles, which break the evenness of the shore in all manner of ways. Then the height and level of the shore is as uncertain as the line of it; it is sometimes high and sometimes low, sometimes spread in sandy plains, as smooth as the sea itself, and of such an equal height with it, that the waves seem to have no

bounds, but the mere figure and convexity of the globe; in other places it is raised into banks and ramparts of earth, and in others it is walled in with rocks; and all this without any order that we can observe, or any other reason than that this is what might be expected in a ruin.

"As to the depth and soundings of the sea, they are under no rule nor equality, any more than the figures of the shores; shallows in some places, and gulphs in others; beds of sands sometimes, and sometimes rocks under water; as navigators have learned by a long and dangerous experience. And though we that are upon dry land, are not much concerned how the rocks and shelves lie in the sea, yet a poor shipwrecked mariner, when he hath run his vessel upon a rock in the middle of the channel, expostulates bitterly with nature, who it was that placed that rock there, and to what purpose? Was there not room enough, saith he, upon the land, or the shore, to lay your great stones, but they must be thrown into the middle of the sea, as it were in spite to navigation? The best apology that can be made for nature in this case, so far as I know, is to confess, that the whole business of the sea-channel is but a ruin, and in a ruin things tumble uncertainly, and commonly lie in confusion."

Again he speaks finely of the ocean when dried up, a spectre which seems to have haunted his imagination.

"But if we should suppose the ocean dry, and that we looked down from the top of some high cloud upon the empty shell, how horridly and barbarously would it look? And with what amazement should we see it under us like an open hell, or a wide bottomless pit? So deep, and hollow, and vast; so broken and confused, so every way deformed and monstrous. This would effectually awaken our imagination, and make us inquire and wonder how such a thing came in nature; from what causes, by what force or engines, could the earth be torn in this prodigious manner? Did they dig the sea with spades, and carry out the moulds in hand-baskets? Where are the entrails laid? And how did they cleave the rocks asunder? If as many pioneers as the army of Xerxes, had been at work ever since the beginning of the world, they could not have made a ditch of this greatness. According to the proportions taken before in the second chapter, the 'cavity or capacity of the sea-channel will amount to no less than 4639090 cubical miles. Nor is it the greatness only, but that wild and multifarious confusion which we see in the parts and fashion of it, that makes it strange and unaccountable; it is another chaos in its kind; who can paint the scenes of it? Gulphs, and precipices, and cataracts; pits within pits, and rocks under rocks, broken mountains and ragged islands, that look as if they had been countries pulled up by the roots, and planted in the sea.

He next proceeds to the mountains; the chapter on this subject opens solemnly and beautifully.

"We have been in the hollows of the earth, and the chambers of the deep, amongst the damps and steams of those lower regions; let us now go air ourselves on the tops of the mountains, where we shall

have a more free and large horizon, and quite another face of things will present itself to our observation.

"The greatest objects of nature are, methinks, the most pleasing to behold; and next to the great concave of the heavens, and those boundless regions where the stars inhabit, there is nothing that I look upon with more pleasure than the wide sea and the mountains of the earth. There is something august and stately in the air of these things, that inspires the mind with great thoughts and passions; we do naturally, upon such occasions, think of God and his greatness : and whatsoever hath but the shadow and appearance of INFINITE, as all things have that are too big for our comprehension, they fill and over-bear the mind with their excess, and cast it into a pleasing kind of stupor and admiration.

"And yet these mountains we are speaking of, to confess the truth, are nothing but great ruins; but such as show a certain magnificence in nature; as from old temples and broken amphitheatres of the Romans we collect the greatness of that people. But the grandeur of a nation is less sensible to those that never see the remains and monuments they have left, and those who never see the mountainous parts of the earth, scarce ever reflect upon the causes of them, or what power in nature could be sufficient to produce them.

"There is nothing doth more awaken our thoughts or excite our minds to inquire into the causes of such things, than the actual view of them; as I have had experience myself, when it was my fortune to cross the Alps and Apennine mountains; for the sight of those wild, vast, and indigested heaps of stones and earth, did so deeply strike. my fancy, that I was not easy till I could give myself some tolerable account how that confusion came in nature."

He is very indignant at the notion which had been started, that the mountains of the earth had been caused by earthquakes in former ages, of which no record remains.

66

'Besides, when were these great earthquakes and disruptions, that did such great execution upon the body of the earth? was this before the flood or since? If before, then the old difficulty returns, how could there be a flood, if the earth was in this mountainous form before that time? This, I think, is demonstrated impossible in the second and third chapters. If since the flood, where were the waters of the earth before these earthquakes made a channel for them? Besides, where is the history or tradition that speaks of these strange things, and of this great change of the earth? hath any writ of the origin of the Alps? In what year of Rome, or what Olympiad, they were born? or how they grew from little ones? how the earth groaned when it brought them forth, when its bowels were torn by the ragged rocks? Do the chronicles of the nations mention these things, or ancient fame, or ancient fables? were they made all at once, or in successive ages? These causes continue still in nature; we have still earthquakes and subterraneous fires and waters, why should they not

We often hear of cities still operate and have the same effects? thrown down by earthquakes, or countries swallowed up, but whoever heard of a new chain of mountains made upon the earth, or a new channel inade for the ocean? We do not read that there hath been so much as a new sinus of the sea ever since the of man; which memory is far more sensible than what they pretend. And things of this nature being both strange and sensible, excite admiration and great attention when they come to pass, and would certainly have been remembered or propagated in some way or other, if they had ever happened since the deluge. They have recorded the foundation of cities and monarchies, the appearance of blazing-stars, the eruptions of fiery mountains, the most remarkable earthquakes and inundations, the great eclipses or obscurations of the sun, and any thing that looked strange or prodigy-like, whether in the heavens or on earth, and these which would have been the greatest prodigies and greatest changes that ever happened in nature, would these have escaped all observation and memory of men? that's as incredible as the things themselves are."

It is an additional characteristic of the ancient world, according to the theory of Burnet, that the equator coincided with the ecliptic, and that the present inclination of these two orbits was caused by the commotions of the deluge. Consequently, in the primeval ages, there was no change of seasons, and a perpetual equinox to all the world. All parts of the year had one and the same face and temperament: there was no winter and summer, no seed-time nor harvest, but a constant temperature of the air and verdure of the earth. "Nor is there," says Burnet, "any wonder in the thing, the wonder is rather on our side, that the earth should stand and continue in the forced posture wherein it is now spinning yearly about an axis that doth not belong to the orbit of its motion; this, I say, is more strange, than that it once stood in a posture that was straight and regular; as we more justly admire the tower at Pisa, that stands crooked, than twenty other straight towers that are much higher." Hence it would appear, that the whole earth was a paradise, and that our first parents were placed in a particular part of it, more highly favoured than any other. In arranging this paradise, and disposing of the progenitors of mankind, Dr. Burnet seems to have been most puzzled by the scarcity of water. He could procure them every thing in profusion except water. This obstacle is overcome with his usual ingenuity. The constant proximity of the sun would make the torrid zone uninhabitable, while the poles would, in a great measure, be deprived of its genial rays. These two circumstances combined would drive the vapours and moisture, from the central parts of the earth, to the extremities, where they would be condensed, descend in rain, and form themselves into streams, which, owing to the

shape of the globe, would flow down to the equator, and gradually branch off and diminish till they approached it, where the power of the sun would again draw them up, again to be condensed, and again to flow from the regions of the poles. The beauty and serenity of this paradisiacal atmosphere would be exceedingly genial to the human frame, and readily gives a solution to the difficulty attached to the longevity of the antediluvians. The whole of this part is laboured with great care, and is perhaps the most curious portion of the book. We cannot, however, afford to go into it. One single view of the question we will extract, because it is short, and has the air of novelty.

"We are now so used 'to a short life, and to drop away after threescore or fourscore years, that when we compare our lives with those of the ante-diluvians, we think the wonder lies wholly on their side, why they lived so long; and so it doth, popularly speaking; but if we speak philosophically, the wonder lies rather on our side, why we live so little, or so short a time: for seeing our bodies are such machines as have a faculty of nourishing themselves, that is, of repairing their lost or decayed parts, so long as they have good nourishment to make use of, why should they not continue in good plight, and always the same? as a flame does, so long as it is supplied with fewel? And that we may the better see on whether side the wonder lies, and from what causes it proceeds, we will propose this problem to be examined, Why the frame or machine of an human body, or of another animal, having that construction of parts and those faculties which it hath, lasts so short a time? And though it fall into no disease, nor have any unnatural accident, within the space of eighty years, more or less, fatally and inevitably decays, dies and perisheth?

"That the state and difficulty of this question may the better appear, let us consider a man in the prime and vigour of his life, at the age of twenty or twenty-four years, of an healthful constitution, and all his vitals sound; let him be nourished with good food, use due exercise, and govern himself with moderation in all other things; the question is, why this body should not continue in the same plight, and in the same strength, for some ages? or, at least, why it should decay so soon, and so fast as we see it does? We do not wonder at things that happen daily, though the causes of them be never so hard to find out; we contract a certain familiarity with common events, and fancy we know as much of them as can be known, though in reality we know nothing of them but matter of fact; which the vulgar knows as well as the wise or the learned. We see daily instances of the shortness of man's life, how soon his race is run, and we do not wonder at it, because 'tis common; yet if we examine the composition of the body, it will be very hard to find any good reasons why the frame of it should decay so soon."

This part of the theory of the earth, which relates to its