from the reproach of their own; Envy and Malice may spit venom in my path, they shall taunt in vain: if I am fated to perish, it shall be in the attempt to rescue Truth from Falsehood, Detraction, and Oblivion."

We e come now to the Hebrew Cosmogany; that part of their writings need delay us but a very short time: I shall content myself with observing by the way, that the men of your tribe ask of our missionaries a rude question or two; such as, " If God was angry with the Father, why was he with the Child? And how could he, All-powerful, Allknowing, allow another being of inferior power and knowledge, to take him unawares?" So deeply is a sense of natural justice rooted in man, as part of himself. We will leave the gentlemen concerned, to ruminate, and answer these queries at leisure, and proceed to what is more important, namely, the Mosaic account of the last deluge. Here, we get to something feasible and substantial, to an event supported by the strongest collateral proof. We have every where traces more or less marked and definable, of such tremendous visitations having happened. The Greeks had their Deucalion and Pyrrha, only a solitary pair saved in the wreck of life; all the rest they destroyed: the Hebrew records save eight. Science con

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fesses, that as yet she has not ascertained the demonstrable cause of these events: I submit, (and this is a doubtful case open to the opinion of every man,) that these deluges, whether proceeding from a cause merely extrinsic to our solar system, or from independent power, have not been at any one period general, but confined and partial in the scope of their ravages. That they are like all other phenomena in Nature, only effects springing from adequate necessitous causes : that they may be periodical, and if so, had happened before, and may, or will, happen again. It has been objected, that the idea of a drowning world is too dreadful and cruel to be listened to: there is some weight in that position, if these catastrophes are spoken of in the light of a "Specialty;" but I can with difficulty bring against Nature a charge of cruelty; and if these be considered as proceeding from natural causes, they are not one iota more cruel or tremendous, than the destructions by earthquake, visitations which we know have taken place, and to which no reflecting man ascribes specialty. Whether is it more cruel that forty millions, forty thousand, or forty units, should perish in natural operation? Each individual loses life in each case. Besides, every living creature is born

into the world subject to the incidents of that world, and is fairly bound to submit to them, if unavoidable, with as much good grace as you, a guest, are bound in courtesy to conform to family regulations, while under the roof of me your host. A man may as well murmur, because he is born by one law, and dies by another; ungrateful that we are! let us cease to accuse Nature; it is we who, as we deserve, are reproved by her, for want of conformity to her mild dictates. For my own part, I can declare, without misgiving of mind, that if our earth was to part in-sunder, draw to, and amalgamate another orb with itself, or be drawn off to another, (supposing it possible that I could survive the change) I should place such to the account of Nature's works, as part of herself. Nor do I conceive such to be impossible; Nature is an assemblage of counterbalancing powers, of mutabilities resulting from immutabilities; if any single check is outweighed, a variation takes place of course. Since the discoveries demonstrated by the telescope, among the other bodies parts of Nature as we are, some have been observed to be in unusual retardation of motion; others have disappeared entirely. Where are the latter? Can that which is something ever become nonentity? Some of the Hottentots

say, the earth fell from the moon: we know she has oscillated from former position, that her polar inclination is not the same as it was a thousand years back: whence is this, to what stupendous results may it not lead? And this last fact should be a caution to us, not to construe natural phenomena upon the narrow footing of this, or that, being beneficial to this or that part of our planet, or to such and such of our race. You will hear persons descant on our polar inclination, and the consequent variation of our seasons, forgetting that the planet Jupiter, a thousand times larger, has its axis at right angles with its orbit. It has been a bar to discovery and improvement, the curse and bane of science, that man, instead of viewing what he has learned, as a link in the chain of the universe; instead of considering his planet as a speck in the immensity of space, a small part of a boundless whole; has been taught to consider himself as the only object for which all things are, the favourite minion of universality. Man is certainly the masterpiece of the globe he inhabits, and that is all we know: may not higher orders of intelligence exist in other spheres, of whose forms and properties we can have no more idea than a blind man can of colours, than the inferior animals here, have of ourselves?

I spoke just now, of a series of mutabilities resulting from immutabilities. It may sound paradoxical, that what is in itself unchangeable should consist in the sheer action of change; and yet perhaps it is a position more difficult to define than to comprehend. While a man's leg is in a healthy state it holds a certain portion of bone, say, for thirty years together; and yet the bone which is there now, is not the same which will be there ten years hence; for it is proved by experiment, that animal substance vegetates, decays, and is insensibly renewed. Here then is a change of identity, in what is, in the aggregate, unchangeable. And so it seems to be with every part of animation; everlasting, unceasing change, is the order of every day; and still its components are the same. Some doubt the existence of a vacuum, of space unfilled by power; that the system of world within world is infinite: it may be so, but is it not possible that the immense assemblage of bodies subject to ccunteracting powers, (and immense beyond all calculation, even in our present confined state of observation, we know them to be,) at length becomes bounded by some new power at present unknown, generated from their own multitudes of action and re-action ?

Some assert the universe has existed in