ye not? Your language, your limbs, are they not good? Look around beneath the heavens; see ye not the mountains and the plains?' "Then they looked, and saw all that there was beneath the heavens. And they gave thanks to the Maker and the Moulder, saying, 'Truly, twice and three times, thanks! We have being; we have been given a mouth, a face; we speak, we understand, we think, we walk, we feel, and we know that which is far and that which is near. All great things and small on the earth and in the sky do we see. Thanks to thee, O Maker, O Moulder, that we have been created, that we have our being, O our Grandmother, O our Grandfather!'"* I can not help regarding these sentiments-these reveries of the uninspired and uninstructed intellect of man feeling after the mystery of his origin and the origin of created things as equaling in sublimity the contemplations of a Socrates or a Plato groping by the dim light of reason for an outlook into the future of the soul. * Histoire des nations civilisées du Mexique et de l'Amerique centrale, durant les siècles antérieurs à Christophe Colomb, écrite sur des documents originaux et entièrement inédits, puisés aux anciennes archives des indigènes, par M. l'abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg. 4 forts vol. in -8 raisin avec carte et figures. FROM CHAPTER XXXV. SOME THOUGHTS ON PERPETUAL MOTION. ROM the citations made in the last chapter we discover the existence of a unanimity of belief in the doctrine of periodical catastrophes which is well calculated to excite a spirit of scientific curiosity. It can scarcely be attributed to a mere tradition descending through the ages, and through all the nations between us and the ancient sages upon the banks of the Ganges. Mere tradition is generally circumscribed by the nationality or race among whom it originates. A tradition of a philosophic character must have been subjected to the scrutiny of the philosophers of the nations to which it traveled. If admitted, and maintained, and perpetuated from age to age among different nations, it must have been because recognized as something more than a tradition. The philosophy of Greece and Rome never harbored a tenet which could only be defended as an Oriental tradition. It must have discovered some rational grounds for the acceptance of this belief, and thus have made it a philosophic principle. What were the grounds of the naturalization of this Oriental faith we might be unable to determine. Pythagoras, however, explicitly taught that his faith was founded on an observation of geological phenomena; and Lyell thinks that the doctrine in general was based upon records and traditions of deluges and earthquakes, any of which came far short of revolutionizing the face of the earth. A doctrine so ineradicable, and so spontaneous in every soil, must have rested upon a rational belief. That belief may be of the nature and authority of an intuitive sentiment. The unanimous consent of mankind to any proposition is to be regarded as the utterance of humanity. That which our common humanity expresses is the expression of the Author of our humanity; it is a kind of revelation, and will be found in all cases to correspond to a reality. But we are not compelled to refer this doctrine to any spontaneous, and universal, and necessary intimations growing out of the constitution of human nature. Why may not this faith have been a grand generalization reached in common by the philosophic minds of all ages? The facts of Nature have always been patent to all the world. The phenomena upon which we have reared the stupendous structure of the modern sciences were as open to the scrutiny of Thales, and Pythagoras, and Plato as to us. There are scientific grounds for such beliefs; and the ancient sages, though they certainly failed to appreciate the data of science to the same extent as ourselves, may reasonably be supposed to have caught glimpses of majestic inductions which involved the destruction of terrestrial order, or even the order of the material universe. We stand now in the presence of those grand and instructive phenomena. On an eminence in the midst of the visible universe, with the multitudinous events of earth and heaven transpiring before our eyes-a universe flooded by the ethereal light of modern science—our intelligence gifted with the power to penetrate to the core of the earth, or fly beyond the flight of the most erratic comet—or pierce the gloom of a million ages passed-or lift the veil which opens the vista of a million ages to come-and here, in this favored position, we ask ourselves what tides we witness in the flow of terrestrial and cosmical events. It is a sublime query. With boldness, but with humility and reverence, let us seek the answer. Looking around us, we behold all Nature instinct with motion. The winter winds are hurrying to and fro; the storm-cloud scatters moisture from the mountains to the sea; the noisy torrent foams down the hill-side, and the majestic river winds ceaselessly to the ocean; vapors rise from the ground and descend again in rain and snow; the punctual tide performs unweariedly its daily perambulation of the globe; the waves' hoarse growl along the rocky beach is never stilled. The forces of matter, in their multiple forms and their myriad labors, keep every element and every atom constantly astir. If we look up, the sun, and moon, and stars are on their journeys. Every planetary orb and every satellite is full of motion. Even while it performs its stupendous journey about the ever shifting its attitude in respect to itself. with orbital and axial motions, each planet nods grandly from its ethereal altitude, and keeps time with the rhythm of the solar year. The stars which we call "fixed” are probably in motion, since twenty or thirty pairs of stars are seen to revolve about each other; and, if the wonderful induction of Mädler is to be credited, our sun, with his retinue of over a hundred planets, satellites, and comets, is sweeping through space on a stupendous journey of 18,000,000 of years. sun, it is forNot content Now we start the inquiry whether all this motion can be perpetuated forever. Motion, according to the new philosophy, is but one of the modes of heat, or electricity, or light, or magnetism, or chemical affinity. Under certain circumstances, one of these forms of force is changed into another. It is a law of every form of force to seek a statical equilibrium, and the transformation of a force signalizes its attainment of an equilibrium. A hammer descends upon a bar of steel and comes to rest; the motion is counteracted, but at this instant, and in consequence of its dis appearance in the form of motion, it reappears in the form of heat. This heat seeks an equilibrium by transferring itself to the colder air, in which motion reappears in the heated ascending column. But this motion, in turn, disappears when the heated column, by transference of its heat, has ceased to, be warmer than the contiguous air. All force is seeking some affinity with which it may be at rest, or it is striving to effect a motion which will bring its activities to rest. In obedience to the force of gravity, rain falls from the clouds, gathers itself into little rills, which, uniting their forces, join arms with the brooklet, and thence glide in company with the rivulet to the outlet of the valley, and wend their way to the sea. In the deep bed of the ocean the waters rest. The demand of gravity is satisfied. The friction of ascending vapors upon the atmosphere disturbs the equilibrium of the electricities; they flash in anger from cloud to cloud, and between the clouds and the earth, ever striving to restore the equilibrium. When that is effected, all the phenomena resulting from electrical action cease, and would forever cease were not a fresh disturbance introduced. If the electricities are again disturbed, it is because some other force is seeking its equilibrium. This other force is out of equilibrium because some third force has created disturbance in the search for its own equilibrium, and thus link hangs upon link in this chain of causation. We know not how far back the remotest disturbing force may lie, but of this we may be certain; there is somewhere, or will be somewhere in the future, a last disturbing force. Behind this, all is rest. When this has attained its equilibrium, all the phenomena resulting from the struggle of the forces will cease. This is a mere abstract statement of the case. It possesses a higher significance than we may suspect. The ar gument concerns the stability of the very earth on which |