three hundred leagues along the sea shore, and seventy leagues in land: it levelled the mountains as it went, threw down the towns, turned the rivers out of their channels, and made an universal havock and confusion. What vaults and caverns under such a continent! what monstrous chasms, which could receive a fractured and sinking country for nine hundred miles in extent! It would really be dreadful, as it has been remarked, if the imagination could penetrate to such hidden recesses. How tremendous would be the scene! We should find cauldrons of a mile in extent, perhaps of several miles, with a fiery mass larger than a living living eye could comprehend, rolling furiously about, with flashings brighter than the sun, and bellowings louder than thunder. We should see the earth undermined, and breaking in upon the fire, with fresh stores of combustible matter, and veins of water pouring in at the same time upon the burning mass, the blasts of which, when repelled by such an immense fire, would drive before it stones, ashes, cinders, and every matter that should obstruct its progress."*

Notwithstanding this frightful picture, we yet reside upon these awful ruins, in perfect content

and

*

Philosophy of the Elements.

and security. On a cursory view it must be acknowledged, the surface of our earth exhibits no great regularity or order. In its outward appearance, it strikes us with heighths, depths, plains, seas, marshes, rivers, caverns, gulfs, volcanos, and a vast variety of other discordant objects; in its inner, with metals, minerals, stones, bitumens, sands, earths, waters, and matter of every kind, seemingly placed by accident. Yet all these apparent deformities are absolutely necessary to vegetation and animal existence. Were the earth's surface smooth and regular, we should not have those beautiful hills which furnish water. A dreary ocean would cover the globe, which would in such case be suited only for the habitation of fishes. As it is, the motions of the sea and the currents of the air are regulated by fixed laws. The returns of the season are uniform, and the rigour of Winter invariably gives place to the verdure of Spring. Men, animals, and plants, consequently succeed one another, and flourish in their destined soils.

LET

LETTER XIII.

FROM what has already been offered to your attention, you will perceive, that I consider the study of the elements as the greatest, and at the same time the most profitable part of natural philosophy. It is the most instructive, and unquestionably the most useful. Yet before we come to treat of the elements in detail, it will be necessary for us to look at one or two opinions relative to certain properties of our globe, which from the earliest ages have occasioned controversy; and which have been by moderns only revived. The indivisibility of matter is one, and not one of the least. Anaxagoras seems to have been one of the earliest

philosophers upon record

who held this doctrine. Aristotle borrowed it from him. Plutarch says, Aristotle also thought that bodies were capable of being divided in infinitum. Democritus was of the same opinion: he thought it possible that the world might be made from an atom. And the foundation of this system was, that nothing can be derived from nothing; that nothing can be annihilated;

and

and that there are certain eternal and incorruptible principles, such as atoms, and a vacuum; the former eternal, solid, and indivisible; the latter eternal, infinite, and impalpable. The atoms, in Democritus's opinion, were animated; in that of Epicurus, inanimated. How are we to suppose an animated existence from inanimated particles? Says Democritus, "the atoms that give life, must have life."

From these sources, Des Cartes and his followers drew their principles of the indivisibility of matter, and from the same authorities other more modern philosophers have probably derived theirs.

Sir Isaac Newton on this subject, but with his usual diffidence and ability, ventured to conclude that, “God in the beginning formed matter into solid, massy, impenetrable, moveable particles or atoms, of such sizes and figures, and with such other properties, and in such proportion to space, as most conduced to the end for which he formed them; and that these primitive particles being solids, are incomparably harder than any porous bodies compounded of them, even so hard as never to wear or break in pieces; no ordinary power being able to divide what God himself

himself made one in the first creation. While these particles," says he, "continue entire, they may compose bodies of one and the same nature and texture in all ages; but, should they wear away, or break in pieces, the nature of things depending on them may be changed. Water and earth composed of old worn particles and fragments of particles, would not be of the same nature and texture now, with water and earth composed of entire particles in the beginning; and therefore, that nature may be lasting, the changes of corporeal things are to be placed only in the various separations, and new associations of motions of these permanent particles, compound bodies being apt to break, not in the midst of solid particles, but where those particles are laid together and only touch in a few points. These atoms are properly the minima natura, the least or ultimate particles into which bodies are divisible; and are conceived to be the first rudiments or component parts of all physical magnitude, or the pre-existent and incorruptible matter whereof bodies are formed."

The doctrine of atoms, you will perceive, arises from a supposition, that matter is not divisible in infinitum. And hence the Peripatetics are led to deny the reality of atoms. "An atom,"

say