scription; and he was applied to by every charitable | the city of New-York, produces this historical essay." society for yearly donations, which he gave very Like the great Father of History, whose words I have cheerfully, considering these applications as so many compliments. He was once invited to a great corporation dinner; and was even twice summoned to attend as a juryman at the court of quarter sessions. Indeed, so renowned did he become, that he could no longer pry about, as formerly, in all holes and corners of the city, according to the bent of his humour, unnoticed and uninterrupted; but several times when he has been sauntering the streets, on his usual rambles of observation, equipped with his cane and cocked hat, the little boys at play have been known to cry, "there goes Diedrich!"-at which the old gentleman seemed not a little pleased, looking upon these salutations in the light of the praises of posterity. In a word, if we take into consideration all these various honours and distinctions, together with an exuberant eulogium, passed on him in the Port Folio (with which, we are told, the old gentleman was so much overpowered, that he was sick for two or three days)—it must be confessed, that few authors have ever lived to receive such illustrious rewards, or have so completely enjoyed in advance their own immortality. After his return from Scaghtikoke, Mr. Knickerbocker took up his residence at a little rural retreat, which the Stuyvesants had granted him on the family domain, in gratitude for his honourable mention of their ancestor. It was pleasantly situated on the borders of one of the salt marshes beyond Corlear's Hook: subject, indeed, to be occasionally overflowed, and much infested, in the summer-time, with musquitoes; but otherwise very agreeable, producing abundant crops of salt grass and bull-rushes. Here, we are sorry to say, the good old gentleman fell dangerously ill of a fever, occasioned by the neighbouring marshes. When he found his end approaching, he disposed of his worldly affairs, leaving the bulk of his fortune to the New-York Historical Society; his Hiedelburgh Catechism, and Vander Donck's work, to the city library; and his saddlebags to Mr. Handaside. He forgave all his enemies, -that is to say, all who bore any enmity towards him; for as to himself, he declared he died in goodwill with all the world. And, after dictating several kind messages to his relations at Scaghtikoke, as well as to certain of our most substantial Dutch citizens, he expired in the arms of his friend the librarian. His remains were interred, according to his own request, in St. Mark's churchyard, close by the bones of his favourite hero, Peter Stuyvesant: and it is rumoured, that the Historical Society have it in mind to erect a wooden monument to his memory in the Bowling-Green. TO THE PUBLIC. "To rescue from oblivion the memory of former incidents, and to render a just tribute of renown to the many great and wonderful transactions of our Dutch progenitors Diedrich Knickerbocker, native of just quoted, I treat of times long past, over which the twilight of uncertainty had already thrown its shadows, and the night of forgetfulness was about to descend for ever. With great solicitude had I long beheld the early history of this venerable and ancient city gradu ally slipping from our grasp, trembling on the lips of narrative old age, and day by day dropping piecemeal into the tomb. In a little while, thought I, and those reverend Dutch burghers, who serve as the tottering monuments of good old times, will be gathered to their fathers; their children, engrossed by the empty pleasures or insignificant transactions of the present age, will neglect to treasure up the recollections of the past, and posterity will search in vain for memorials of the days of the Patriarchs. The origin of our city will be buried in eternal oblivion, and even the names and achievements of Wouter Van Twiller, William Kieft, and Peter Stuyvesant, be enveloped in doubt and fiction, like those of Romulus and Remus, of Charlemagne, King Arthur, Rinaldo, and Godfrey of Bologne. Determined, therefore, to avert if possible this threatened misfortune, I industriously set myself to work, to gather together all the fragments of our infant history which still existed, and like my revered prototype, Herodotus, where no written records could be found, I have endeavoured to continue the chain of history by well-authenticated traditions. In this arduous undertaking, which has been the whole business of a long and solitary life, it is incredible the number of learned authors I have consulted; and all but to little purpose. Strange as it may seem, though such multitudes of excellent works have been written about this country, there are none extant which give any full and satisfactory account of the early history of New-York, or of its three first Dutch governors. I have, however, gained much valuable and curious matter, from an elaborate manuscript written in exceeding pure and classic Low Dutch, excepting a few errors in orthography, which was found in the archives of the Stuyvesant family. Many legends, letters, and other documents have I likewise gleaned, in my researches among the family chests and lumber garrets of our respectable Dutch citizens; and I have gathered a host of well-authenticated traditions from divers excellent old ladies of my acquaintance, who requested that their names might not be mentioned. Nor must I neglect to acknowledge how greatly I have been assisted by that admirable and praiseworthy institution, the NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY, to which I here publicly return my sincere acknowledgments. In the conduct of this inestimable work, I have adopted no individual model; but, on the contrary, have simply contented myself with combining and concentrating the excellencies of the most approved ancient historians. Like Zenophon, I have maintained the utmost impartiality, and the strictest adherence to truth, throughout my history. I have enriched it, after the manner of Sallust, with various characters of ancient worthies, drawn at full length and faith Beloe's Herodotus. fully coloured. I have seasoned it with profound | work, and rears a monument that will transmit their political speculations like Thucydides, sweetened it renown to all succeeding ages. with the graces of sentiment like Tacitus, and infused into the whole the dignity, the grandeur, and magnificence of Livy. What has been the fate of many fair cities of antiquity, whose nameless ruins encumber the plains of Europe and Asia, and awaken the fruitless inquiry of I am aware that I shall incur the censure of numer- the traveller? They have sunk into dust and silence ous very learned and judicious critics, for indulging—they have perished from remembrance, for want of too frequently in the bold excursive manner of my a historian! The philanthropist may weep over their favourite Herodotus. And to be candid, I have found desolation-the poet may wander among their mouldit impossible always to resist the allurements of those ering arches and broken columns, and indulge the pleasing episodes, which, like flowery banks and fra- visionary flights of his fancy-but alas! alas! the grant bowers, beset the dusty road of the historian, and modern historian, whose pen, like my own, is doomed entice him to turn aside, and refresh himself from his to confine itself to dull matter of fact, seeks in vain wayfaring. But I trust it will be found that I have among their oblivious remains for some memorial that always resumed my staff, and addressed myself to my may tell the instructive tale of their glory and their ruin. weary journey with renovated spirits, so that both "Wars, conflagrations, deluges," says Aristotle, my readers and myself have been benefited by the re- "destroy nations, and with them all their monuments, laxation. their discoveries, and their vanities.-The torch of science has more than once been extinguished and re dent, reunite the thread of generations." Indeed, though it has been my constant wish and uniform endeavour to rival Polybius himself, in ob-kindled-a few individuals, who have escaped by acciserving the requisite unity of History, yet the loose and unconnected manner in which many of the facts herein recorded have come to hand, rendered such an attempt extremely difficult. This difficulty was likewise increased, by one of the grand objects contemplated in my work, which was to trace the rise of sundry customs and institutions in this best of cities, and to compare them, when in the germ of infancy, with what they are in the present old age of knowledge and improvement. The same sad misfortune which has happened to so many ancient cities, will happen again, and from the same sad cause, to nine-tenths of those which now flourish on the face of the globe. With most of them, the time for recording their early history is gone by; their origin, their foundation, together with the eventful period of their youth, are for ever buried in the rubbish of years; and the same would have been the case with this fair portion of the earth, if I had not snatched it from obscurity in the very nick of time, at the moment that those matters herein recorded were about entering into the wide-spread insatiable maw of oblivion—if I had not dragged them out, as it were, by the very locks, just as the monster's adamantine fangs were closing upon them for ever! And here have I. as before observed, carefully collected, collated, and arranged them, scrip and scrap, "punt en punt, gat en gat," and commenced in this little work, a history to serve as a foundation, on which other historians may hereafter raise a noble superstructure, swelling in process of time, until Knickerbocker's New-York may be equally voluminous with Gibbon's Rome, or Hume and Smollet's England! But the chief merit on which I value myself, and found my hopes for future regard, is that faithful veracity with which I have compiled this invaluable little work; carefully winnowing away the chaff of hypoth- | esis, and discarding the tares of fable, which are too apt to spring up and choke the seeds of truth and wholesome knowledge.-Had I been anxious to captivate the superficial throng, who skim like swallows over the surface of literature; or had I been anxious to commend my writings to the pampered palates of literary epicures, I might have availed myself of the obscurity that overshadows the infant years of our city, to introduce a thousand pleasing fictions. But I have scrupulously discarded many a pithy tale and marvellous adventure, whereby the drowsy ear of summer indolence might be enthralled; jealousy maintaining that fidelity, gravity, and dignity, which should ever distinguish the historian. "For a writer of this class," >bserves an elegant critic, "must sustain the character ɔf a wise man, writing for the instruction of posterity; one who has studied to inform himself well, who has pondered his subject with care, and addresses himself to our judgment, rather than to our imagination." Thrice happy, therefore, is this our renowned city. | mander, to honour and immortality. in having incidents worthy of swelling the theme of history; and doubly thrice happy is it in having such a historian as myself to relate them. For after all, gentle reader, cities of themselves, and, in fact, empires of themselves, are nothing without a historian. It is the patient narrator who records their prosperity as they rise-who blazons forth the splendour of their noontide meridian-who props their feeble memorials as they totter to decay-who gathers together their scattered fragments as they rot-and who piously, at length, collects their ashes into the mausoleum of his And now indulge me for a moment, while I lay down my pen, skip to some little eminence at the distance of two or three hundred years ahead; and, casting back a bird's-eye glance over the waste of years that is to roll between, discover myself-little I !—at this moment the progenitor, prototype, and precursor of them all, posted at the head of this host of literary worthies, with my book under my arm, and New-York on my back, pressing forward, like a gallant com Such are the vain-glorious imaginings that will now and then enter into the brain of the author-that irradiate, as with celestial light, his solitary chamber, cheering his weary spirits, and animating him to persevere in his labours. And I have freely given utterance to these rhapsodies, whenever they have occurred; not, I trust, from an unusual spirit of egotism, but merely that the reader may for once have an idea, how an author thinks and feels while he is writinga kind of knowledge very rare and curious, and much to be desired. BOOK I. CONTAINING DIVERS INGENIOUS THEORIES AND CREATION AND POPULATION OF THE WORLD, YORK. CHAPTER 1. DESCRIPTION OF THE WORLD. ACCORDING to the best authorities, the world in which we dwell is a huge, opaque, reflecting, inanimate mass, floating in the vast ethereal ocean of infinite space. It has the form of an orange, being an oblate spheroid, curiously flattened at opposite parts, for the insertion of two imaginary poles, which are supposed to penetrate and unite at the centre; thus forming an axis on which the mighty orange turns with a regular diurnal revolution. The transitions of light and darkness, whence proceed the alternations of day and night, are produced by this diurnal revolution successively presenting the different parts of the earth to the rays of the sun. The latter is, according to the best, that is to say, the latest accounts, a luminous or fiery body, of a prodigious magnitude, from which this world is driven by a centrifugal or repelling power, and to which it is drawn by a centripetal or attractive force, otherwise called the attraction of gravitation; the combination, or rather the counteraction, of these two opposing impulses producing a circular and annual revolution. Hence result the different seasons of the year, viz., spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Stones."* In this valuable work he has related the history of the world, from the creation down to the moment of writing; which was under the Caliphate of Mothi Billah, in the month Dgioumadi-el-aoual of the 336th year of the Hegira or flight of the Prophet. He informs us that the earth is a huge bird, Mecca and Medina constituting the head, Persia and India the right wing, the land of Gog the left wing, and Africa the tail. He informs us, moreover, that an earth has existed before the present, (which he considers as a mere chicken of 7,000 years) that it has undergone divers deluges, and that, according to the opinion of some well-informed Brahmins of his acquaintance, it will be renovated every seventythousandth hazarouam; each hazarouam consisting of 12,000 years. These are a few of the many contradictory opinions of philosophers concerning the earth, and we find that the learned have had equal perplexity as to the nature of the sun. Some of the ancient philosophers have affirmed that it is a vast wheel of brilliant fire t others, that it is merely a mirror or sphere of transparent crystal; and a third class, at the head of whom stands Anaxagoras, maintained that it was nothing but a huge ignited mass of iron or stone-indeed, he declared the heavens to be merely a vault of stone-and that the stars were stones whirled upward from the earth, and set on fire by the velocity of its revolutions.§ But I give little attention to the doctrines of this philosopher, the people of Athens having fully refuted them, by banishing him from their city; a concise mode of answering unwelcome doctrines, much resorted to in former days. Another sect of philosophers do declare, that certain fiery particles exhale constantly from the earth, which concentrating in a single point of the firmament by day, constitute the sun, but being scattered and rambling about in the dark at night, collect in various This I believe to be the most approved modern points, and form stars. These are regularly burnt theory on the subject--though there be many phi-out and extinguished, not unlike to the lamps in our losophers who have entertained very different opin- streets, and require a fresh supply of exhalations for ions; some, too, of them entitled to much deference the next occasion.] from their great antiquity and illustrious characters. Thus it was advanced by some of the ancient sages, that the earth was an extended plain, supported by vast pillars; and by others, that it rested on the head of a snake, or the back of a huge tortoise-but as they did not provide a resting-place for either the pillars or the tortoise, the whole theory fell to the ground, for want of proper foundation. The Brahmins assert, that the heavens rest upon the earth, and the sun and moon swim therein like fishes in the water, moving from east to west by day, and gliding along the edge of the horizon to their original stations during the night;* while, according to the pauranicas of India, it is a vast plain, encircled by seven oceans of milk, nectar, and other delicious liquids; that it is studded with seven mountains, and ornamented in the centre by a mountainous rock of burnished gold; and that a great dragon occasionally swallows up the moon, which accounts for the phenomena of lunar eclipses.t Beside these, and many other equally sage opinjons, we have the profound conjectures of ABOULHASSAN-ALY, son of Al Khan, son of Aly, son of Abderrahman, son of Abdallah, son of Masoud-elHad-heli, who is commonly called MASOUDI, and surnamed Cothbeddin, but who takes the humble title of Laheb-ar-rasoul, which means the companion of the ambassador of God. He has written a universal history, entitled "Mouroudge-ed-dharab, or the Golden Meadows, and the Mines of Precious Faria y Souza. Mick. Lus. note b. 7 It is even recorded, that at certain remote and obscure periods, in consequence of a great scarcity of fuel, the sun has been completely burnt out, and sometimes not rekindled for a month at a time; -a most melancholy circumstance, the very idea of which gave vast concern to Heraclitus, that worthy weeping philosopher of antiquity. In addition to these various speculations, it was the opinion of Herschel, that the sun is a magnificent, habitable abode; the light it furnishes arising from certain empyreal, luminous or phosphoric clouds, swimming in its transparent atmosphere.T But we will not enter farther at present into the nature of the sun, that being an inquiry not immediately necessary to the development of this history; neither will we embroil ourselves in any more of the endless disputes of philosophers touching the form of this globe, but content ourselves with the theory advanced in the beginning of this chapter, and will proceed to illustrate, by experiment, the complexity of motion therein ascribed to this our rotatory planet. Professor Von Poddingcoft (or Puddinghead, as *Mss. Bibliot, Roi. Fr. + Plutarch de Placitis Philosoph. lib. iii. cap. 20. Phys. lib. i. p. 56. Plut. de Plac. Phi. Achill. Tat. Isag. cap. 19. Ap. Petav. t. iii. p. 81. Stob. Eclog. Diogenes Laertius in Anaxag. 1. ii. sec. 8. Plat. Apol. t. i. p. 26. Plut. de Plac. Philo. Xenoph. Mem. 1. iv. p. 815. Aristot. Meteor. 1. ii. c. 2. Idem. Probl. sec. 15. Stob. Ech Phys. 1. i. p. 55. Bruck. Hist. Phil. t. i. p. 1154, &c. Philos. Trans. 1795, p. 72. Idem. 1801, p. 265. Nich, Philos. Journ. i. p. 13. the name may be rendered into English,) was long the world: he informed his brother philosophers celebrated in the university of Leyden, for profound that the circular motion of the earth round the sun gravity of deportment, and a talent of going to sleep was no sooner engendered by the conflicting impulses in the midst of examinations, to the infinite relief of above described, than it became a regular revolution, his hopeful students, who thereby worked their way independent of the causes which gave it origin. His through college with great ease and little study. In learned brethren readily joined in the opinion, heartily the course of one of his lectures, the learned profes-glad of any explanation that would decently extricate sor, seizing a bucket of water, swung it round his them from their embarrassment-and ever since that head at arm's-length. The impulse with which he era the world has been left to take her own course, threw the vessel from him, being a centrifugal force, and to revolve around the sun in such orbit as she the retention of his arm operating as a centripetal thinks proper. power, and the bucket, which was a substitute for the earth, describing a circular orbit round about the globular head and ruby visage of Professor Von Poddingcoft, which formed no bad representation of the sun. All of these particulars were duly explained to CHAPTER II. A MULTITUDE OF EXCELLENT THEORIES, BY HAVING thus briefly introduced my reader to the world, and given him some idea of its form and situation, he will naturally be curious to know from whence it came, and how it was created. And, indeed, the clearing up of these points is absolutely essential to my history, inasmuch as if this world had not been formed, it is more than probable that this renowned island on which is situated the city of New-York, would never have had an existence. The regular course of my history, therefore, requires that I should proceed to notice the cosmogony, or formation of this our globe. the class of gaping students around him. He ap- COSMOGONY, OR CREATION OF THE WORLD; WITH prized them, moreover, that the same principle of gravitation, which retained the water in the bucket, restrains the ocean from flying from the earth in its rapid revolutions; and he farther informed them, that should the motion of the earth be suddenly checked, it would incontinently fall into the sun, through the centripetal force of gravitation; a most ruinous event to this planet, and one which would also obscure, though it most probably would not extinguish, the solar luminary. An unlucky stripling, one of those vagrant geniuses who seem sent into the world merely to annoy worthy men of the puddinghead order, desirous of ascertaining the correctness of the experiment, suddenly arrested the arm of the professor, just at the moment that the bucket was in its zenith, which immediately descended with astonishing precision upon the head of the philosopher. A hallow sound, and a red-hot hiss, attended And now I give my readers fair warning, that I the contact; but the theory was in the amplest man-am about to plunge, for a chapter or two, into as ner illustrated, for the unfortunate bucket perished complete a labyrinth as ever historian was perplexed in the conflict; but the blazing countenance of Pro- withal; therefore, I advise them to take fast hold fessor Von Poddingcoft emerged from amidst the of my skirts, and keep close at my heels, venturing waters, glowing fiercer than ever with unutterable neither to the right hand nor to the left, lest they indignation, whereby the students were marvellously get bemired in a slough of unintelligible learning, or edified, and departed considerably wiser than before. have their brains knocked out by some of those hard It is a mortifying circumstance, which greatly per- Greek names which will be flying about in all direcplexes many a philosopher, that Nature often refuses tions. But should any of them be too indolent or to second his efforts; so that after having invented chicken-hearted to accompany me in this perilous one of the most ingenious and natural theories im- undertaking, they had better take a short cut round, aginable, she will have the perverseness to act di- and wait for me at the beginning of some smoother rectly in the teeth of it. This is a manifest and un- chapter. merited grievance, since it throws the censure of the vulgar and unlearned entirely upon the philosopher; whereas the fault is to be ascribed to dame Nature, who, with the proverbial fickleness of her sex, is continually indulging in coquetries and caprices; and who seems to take pleasure in violating all philosophic rules, and jilting the most learned and indefatigable of her adorers. Thus it happened with respect to the foregoing explanation of the motion of our planet; it appears that the centrifugal force has long since ceased to operate, while its antagonist remains in undiminished potency: the world, therefore, ought, in strict propriety, to tumble into the sun; philosophers were convinced that it would do so, and awaited in anxious impatience the fulfilment of their prognostics. But the untoward planet pertinaciously continued her course, notwithstanding that she had reason, philosophy, and a whole university of learned professors, opposed to her conduct. The philosophers took this in very ill part, and it is thought they would never have pardoned the slight which they conceived put upon them by the world, had not a good-natured professor kindly officiated as a mediator between the parties and effected a reconciliation. Finding the world would not accommodate itself to the theory, he wisely accommodated the theory to Of the creation of the world, we have a thousand contradictory accounts; and though a very satisfactory one is furnished us by divine revelation, yet every philosopher feels himself in honour bound to furnish us with a better. As an impartial historian, I consider it my duty to notice their several theories, by which mankind have been so exceedingly edified and instructed. Thus it was the opinion of certain ancient sages, that the earth and the whole system of the universe was the deity himself;* a doctrine most strenuously maintained by Zenophanes and the whole tribe of Eleatics, as also by Strabo and the sect of peripatetic philosophers. Pythagoras likewise inculcated the famous numerical system of the monad, dyad, and triad, and by means of his sacred quaternary elucidated the formation of the world, the arcana of nature, and the principles both of music and morals.t Other sages adhered to the mathematical system of squares and triangles; the cube, the pyramid, and the sphere, the tetrahedron, the octahedron, the icos. ahedron, and the dodecahedron. While others ad Aristot. ap. Cic. lib. i. cap. 3. † Aristot. Metaph. lib. i. c. 5. Idem. de Cœlo, 1. iii. c. I. Rous seau mem. sur. Musique ancien. p. 39. Plutarch de Plac Philos. lib. i. cap. 3. Tim. Locr. ap. Plato. t. iii. p. 9o. WORKS OF WASHINGTON IRVING. vocated the great elementary theory, which refers | hence his nose, and the nose of all his descendants, the construction of our globe, and all that it con- became flat. tains, to the combination of four material elementsair, earth, fire, and water; with the assistance of a fifth, an immaterial and vivifying principle. Nor must I omit to mention the great atomic system, taught by old Moschus, before the siege of Troy; revived by Democritus, of laughing memory; improved by Epicurus, that king of good fellows, and modernized by the fanciful Descartes. But I decline inquiring, whether the atoms, of which the earth is said to be composed, are eternal or recent; whether they are animate or inanimate; whether, agreeably to the opinion of the atheists, they were fortuitously aggregated, or, as the theists maintain, were arranged by a supreme intelligence.* Whether, in fact, the earth be an insensate clod, or whether it be animated by a soul;t which opinion was strenuously maintained by a host of philosophers, at the head of whom stands the great Plato, that temperate sage, who threw the cold water of philosophy on the form of sexual intercourse, and inculcated the doctrine of Platonic love-an exquisitely refined intercourse, but much better adapted to the ideal inhabitants of his imaginary island of Atlantis than to the sturdy race, composed of rebellious flesh and blood, which populates the little matter-of-fact island we inhabit. woman fell down from heaven, and that a tortoise The Mohawk philosophers tell us, that a pregnant covered with water; and that the woman, sitting took her upon its back, because every place was upon the tortoise, paddled with her hands in the water, and raked up the earth, whence it finally happened that the earth became higher than the water. * ancient and outlandish philosophers, whose deploraBut I forbear to quote a number more of these ble ignorance, in despite of all their erudition, compelled them to write in languages which but few of my readers can understand; and I shall proceed briefly to notice a few more intelligible and fashionable theories of their modern successors. conjectures that this globe was originally a globe of And, first, I shall mention the great Buffon, who liquid fire, scintillated from the body of the sun, by the percussion of a comet, as a spark is generated by the collision of flint and steel. That at first it was surrounded by gross vapours, which, cooling and condensing in process. of time, constituted, according to their densities, earth, water, and air; which gradually arranged themselves, according to their respective gravities, round the burning or vitrified mass that formed their centre. at first were universally paramount; and he terrifies Hutton, on the contrary, supposes that the waters himself with the idea that the earth must be eventually washed away by the force of rain, rivers, and mountain torrents, until it is confounded with the ocean, or, in other words, absolutely dissolves into itself.-Sublime idea! far surpassing that of the tender-hearted damsel of antiquity, who wept herself into a fountain; or the good dame of Narbonne in France, who, for a volubility of tongue unusual in her sex, was doomed to peel five hundred thousand and thirty-nine ropes of onions, and actually run out at her eyes before half the hideous task was accomplished." Beside these systems, we have, moreover, etical theogony of old Hesiod, who generated the the powhole universe in the regular mode of procreation; and the plausible opinion of others, that the earth was hatched from the great egg of night, which floated in chaos, and was cracked by the horns of the celestial bull. To illustrate this last doctrine, Burnet, in his theory of the earth, has favoured us with an accurate drawing and description, both of the form and texture of this mundane egg; which is found to bear a marvellous resemblance to that of a goose. Such of my readers as take a proper interest in the origin of this our planet, will be pleased to learn, that the most profound sages of antiquity, among the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Persians, Greeks, and Latins, have alternately assisted at the hatch-rivalled Ditton in his researches after the longitude, Whiston, the same ingenious philosopher who ing of this strange bird, and that their cacklings (for which the mischief-loving Swift discharged on have been caught, and continued in different tones their heads a most savoury stanza,) has distinguished and inflections, from philosopher to philosopher, unto himself by a very admirable theory respecting the the present day. comet, which being selected for the abode of man, earth. He conjectures that it was originally a chaotic was removed from its eccentric orbit, and whirled round the sun in its present regular motion; by which change of direction, order succeeded to confusion in the arrangement of its component parts, The philosopher adds, that the deluge was produced by an uncourteous salute from the watery tail of another comet; doubtless through sheer envy of its improved condition: thus furnishing a melancholy proof that jealousy may prevail, even among the heavenly bodies, and discord interrupt that celestial harmony of the spheres so melodiously sung by the But while briefly noticing long-celebrated systems of ancient sages, let me not pass over with neglect those of other philosophers; which, though less universal and renowned, have equal claims to attention, and equal chance for correctness. Thus it is recorded by the Brahmins, in the pages of their inspired Shastah, that the angel Bistnoo, transforming himself into a great boar, plunged into the watery abyss, and brought up the earth on his tusks. Then issued from him a mighty tortoise, and a mighty snake; and Bistnoo placed the snake erect upon the back of the tortoise, and he placed the earth upon the head of the snake.§ poets. The negro philosophers of Congo affirm that the world was made by the hands of angels, excepting among which are those of Burnet, and Woodward, But I pass over a variety of excellent theories, their own country, which the Supreme Being con- and Whitehurst; regretting extremely that my time structed himself, that it might be supremely excel-will not suffer me to give them the notice they delent. And he took great pains with the inhabitants, and made them very black, and beautiful; and when he had finished the first man, he was wel! pleased with him, and smoothed him over the face; and *Aristot. Nat. Auscult. 1. ii. cap. 6. Aristoph. Metaph. lib. i. cap. 3. Cic. de Nat. Deor. lib. i. cap. 10. Justin. Mart. orat. ad gent. p. 20. + Mosheim in Cudw. lib. i. cap. 4. Plat. lib. iii. Mem. de l'Acad. des Belles Lettr. t. xxxii. p, 19, et Tim. de anim. mund ap. al. Book i. ch. 5. Holwell. Gent Philosophy. serve-and shall conclude with that of the renowned Dr. Darwin. This learned Theban, who is as much distinguished for rhyme as reason, and for goodnatured credulity as serious research, and who has recommended himself wonderfully to the good graces of the ladies, by letting them into all the gallantries, amours, intrigues, and other topics of scandal of Johannes Megapolensis, Jun. Account of Maquaas or Mihawk Indians. 1644. |