so overstocked with people, that it would have been impossible for them to fubfift in it; and the animals, &c. which were given by God for the food of man and of each other, would have been nearly, if not quite extinct: for we know, that many of the wild animals require vaft uninhabited plains, forests, and mountains, to breed, feed, and bring up their young. But Providence has ordered things otherwise, by putting enmity between man and man, and between nation and nation, in order to prevent the over great increase of the human kind, which must confequently have greatly leffened, if not entirely extirpated, many of the animal fpecies, before the still increasing number of men had proved their own deftruction, which finally muft have been the cafe but it is reasonable to believe, that Providence equally regards the prefervation of all the animals, &c. that are created.

Wife ftates, that have fuperftitious and ignorant fubjects, are often under a neceffity of making fuch laws as confift little with rea

fon,

fon, common fenfe, or the natural liberties of mankind they often are obliged by fuch methods to stop the courfe of popular clamour, which would otherwise reduce a well-established state to anarchy and confufion. The remedy against fuch inconveniencies is a slack execution of fuch bad laws. I believe, the wisest of the human race do not expect to find real and abfolute moral juftice and right amongst the most honest and most experienced of their own fpecies; for right and wrong, virtue and vice, &c. are differently understood, according to the different modes, customs, and religions of different countries, and different times in the fame countries; though, in the unchangeable Divine Will, it would be great prefumption in us to suppose the least variation or shadow of change. Divine juftice and rectitude must be absolutely and conftantly the fame; but, as we are in our nature very imperfect beings, our conceptions, words, and actions, must be all imperfect; infomuch, that were ten of the wifeft amongst men, living at the same

time,

time, and under the fame government, to form a plan of moral, universal, abfolute rectitude in the conduct of human life, they would all widely differ from each other.

СНАР.

CHAP. V.

N all countries, whether agriculture be pro

IN

moted or neglected by mankind, náture assists to fow and plant as well as to fertilize the earth. The feeds of lofty trees are many of them winged; and when they are ripe, the autumnal winds blow them off, and scatter them at a great distance from their mother plants: others are in pods, or hufks, and not capable of being carried by the motion of the air; but Providence hath given them as food to birds, who carry them to distant places, and in feeding scatter part of the feed in foils proper for them to take root in and spring up. Even the droughts of the autumn contribute to increase and propagate trees and plants; for by causing deep chinks or chaps in the earth, the feeds of trees, and larger plants, that require depth, are lodged at proper depths for their growth, and, at the fame time, fecured from fuch animals as feed on them. The feeds of annual plants

are,

are, many of them, provided with a light down, by which they are enabled, with the help of the wind, to rife to great heights, and spread themfelves very wide to propagate their species in diftant lands. The fun, by its annual vifits to the northern and fouthern tropics, alternately gives action and reft to vegetation. The floods, which in many countries fall at certain seasons from the mountains, cover the plains, and enrich the foil by the fediment of their waters. The winter's frofts alfo, by expanding the moisture contained in the earth, loosen and break the clods, fo as to make them give way to the spreading roots of vegetables: fwine, moles, and fome other animals, root up and loofen the earth, and fit it to receive the feeds of plants.

The Rev. Mr. Robinson, rector of Ousby in Cumberland, in his Natural History of Westmoreland and Cumberland, part II. page 97, fays, "that birds are natural planters of all

forts of wood and trees: they diffeminate the "kernels upon the earth, which, like nurseries, "brings them forth till they grow up to their

"natural