under the name of sufficing reason. It is, however, of great antiquity. It is no recent discovery, that there is no effect without a cause, and that often the smallest cause produces the greatest effects.

Lord Bolingbroke acknowledges that he was indebted to the petty quarrels between the duchess of Marlborough and Mrs. Masham, for an opportunity of concluding the private treaty between queen Anne and Louis XIV. This treaty led to the peace of Utrecht; the peace of Utrecht secured the throne of Spain to Philip V.; Philip took Naples and Sicily from the house of Austria. Thus the Spanish prince, who is now king of Naples, evidently owes his kingdom to Mrs. Masham : he would not have had it, nor even have been born, if the duchess of Marlborough had been more complaisant towards the queen of England: his existence at Naples depended on one folly more or less at the court of London.

Examine the situations of every people upon earth; they are in like manner founded on a train of occurrences seemingly without connection, but all connected. In this immense machine, all is wheel, pulley, cord, or spring.

It is the same in physical order. A wind blowing from the southern seas and the remotest parts of Africa, brings with it a portion of the African atmosphere, which, falling in showers in the vallies of the Alps, fertilises our lands; on the other hand, our north wind carries our vapours among the negroes; we do good to Guinea, and Guinea to us. The chain extends from one end of the universe to the other.

But the truth of this principle seems to me to be strangely abused; for it is thence concluded that there is no atom, however small, the movement of which has not influenced the actual arrangement of the whole world; that the most trivial accident, whether among men or animals, is an essential link in the great chain of destiny.

Let us understand one another. dently has its cause, ascending from

Every effect evi

cause to cause,

into the abyss of eternity; but every cause has not its effect, going down to the end of ages. I grant that all events are produced one by another: if the past was pregnant with the present, the present is pregnant with the future: every thing is begotten, but every thing does not beget. It is as a genealogical-tree: every house, we know, ascends to Adam; but many of the family have died without issue.

The events of this world form a genealogical-tree. It is indisputable that the inhabitants of Spain and Gaul are descended from Gomer, and the Russians from his younger brother Magog; for in how many great books is this genealogy to be found! It cannot then be denied that the Grand Turk, who is also descended from Magog, is obliged to him for the good beating given him in 1769 by the empress Catherine II. This occurrence is evidently linked with other great events; but whether Magog spat to the right or to the left near mount Caucasus-made two or three circles in a well-or whether he lay on his right side or his left, I do not see that it could have much influence on present affairs.

It must be remembered, because it is proved by Newton, that nature is not a plenum; and that motion is not communicated by collision until it has made the tour of the universe. Throw a body of a certain density into water: you easily calculate that at the end of such a time the movement of this body, and that which it has given to the water, will cease; the motion will be lost, and rest will be restored. So the motion produced by Magog in spitting into a well, cannot have influenced what is now passing in Moldavia and Wallachia. Present events, then, are not the offspring of all past events: they have their direct lines; but with a thousand small collateral lines they have nothing to do. Once more be it observed, that every being has a parent, but every one has not an offspring.*

* See FATE,

CHANGES THAT HAVE OCCURRED IN THE GLOBE.

WHEN We have seen with our own eyes a mountain advancing into a plain-that is, an immense rock detach-' ed from that mountain, and covering the fields; an entire castle buried in the earth; or a swallowed-up river bursting from below; indubitable marks of an immense mass of water having once inundated a country now inhabited; and so many traces of other revolutions, we are even more disposed to believe in the great changes that have altered the face of the world, than a Parisian lady who knows that the square in which her house stands was formerly a cultivated field: but a lady of Naples, who has seen the ruins of Herculaneum under ground, is still less enthralled by the prejudice which leads us to believe that everything has always been as

it now is.

Was there a great burning of the world in the time of Phaeton? Nothing is more likely but this catastrophe was no more caused by the ambition of Phaëton or the anger of Jupiter the thunderer, than at Lisbon, in 1755, the divine vengeance was drawn down, the subterraneous fires kindled, and half the city destroyed, by the fires so often lighted there by the inquisition;-besides, we know that Mequinez, Tetuan, and considerable hordes of Arabs, have been treated even worse than Lisbon, though they had no inquisition.

The island of St. Domingo, entirely devastated not long ago, had no more displeased the Great Being than the island of Corsica: all is subject to eternal physical laws.

Sulphur, bitumen, nitre, and iron, enclosed within the bowels of the earth, have overturned many a city, opened many a gulph; and we are constantly liable to these accidents attached to the way in which this globe is put together; just as, in many countries during winter, we are exposed to the attacks of famishing wolves and tigers.

If fire, which Heraclitus believed to be the principle

of all, has altered the face of a part of the earth, Thales's first principle, water, has operated as great changes.

One half of America is still inundated by the ancient overflowings of the Maranon, Rio de la Plata, the St. Lawrence, the Mississippi, and all the rivers perpetually swelled by the eternal snows of the highest mountains in the world, stretching from one end of that continent to the other. These accumulated floods have almost everywhere produced vast marshes. The neighbouring lands have become uninhabitable; and the earth, which the hands of man should have made fruitful, has produced only pestilence.

The same thing happened in China and in Egypt: a multitude of ages were necessary to dig canals and dry the lands. Add to these lengthened disasters the irruptions of the sea, the lands it has invaded and deserted, the islands it has detached from the continent, and you will find that, from east to west, from Japan to Mount Atlas, it has devastated more than eighty thousand square leagues.

The swallowing up of the island Atlantis from the ocean may, with as much reason, be considered historical as fabulous. The shallowness of the Atlantic as far as the Canaries, might be taken as a proof of this great event, and the Canaries themselves for fragments of the island Atlantis.

Plato tells us, in his Timæus, that the Egyptian priests, amongst whom he had travelled, had in their possession ancient registers which certified that island's going under water. Plato says, that this catastrophe happened nine thousand years before his time. No one will believe this chronology on Plato's word only: but neither can any one adduce against it any physical proof, nor even an historical testimony from any profane writer.

Pliny, in his third book, says, that from time immemorial the people of the southern coasts of Spain believed that the sea had forced a passage between Calpe and Abila-" Indigenæ columnas Herculis vocant,

creduntque per fossas exclusa anteà admisisse maria, et rerum naturæ mutâsse faciem."

An attentive traveller may convince himself by his own eyes, that the Cyclades and the Sporades were once part of the continent of Greece, and especially that Sicily was once joined to Apulia. The two volcanos of Etna and Vesuvius having the same basis in the sea, the little gulph of Charybdis; the only deep part of that sea, the perfect resemblance of the two soils, are incontrovertible testimonies. The floods of Deucalion and Ogyges are well known; and the fables founded upon this truth are still more the talk of all the west.

The ancients have mentioned several deluges in Asia. The one spoken of by Berosus happened (as he tells us) in Chaldea, about four thousand three or four hundred years before the Christian era; and Asia was as much inundated with fables about this deluge as it was by the overflowings of the Tigris and Euphrates, and all the rivers that fall into the Euxine.*

It is true that such overflowings cannot cover the country with more than a few feet of water: but the consequent sterility, the washing away of houses, and the destruction of cattle, are losses which it requires nearly a century to repair. We know how much they have cost Holland, more than the half of which has been lost since the year 1050. She is still obliged to sustain a daily conflict with the ever threatening ocean. She has never employed so many soldiers in resisting her enemies as she employs labourers in continually defending her against the assaults of a sea always ready to swallow her.

The road from Egypt to Phenicia, along the borders of lake Serbo, was once quite practicable; but it has long ceased to be so: it is now nothing but a quicksand, moistened by stagnant water. In short, a great portion of the earth would be no other than a vast poisonous marsh, inhabited by monsters, but for the assiduous labour of the human race.

* See DELUGE,