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ANTIQUITY OF THE WORLD.

THERE have been great disputes concerning the antiquity of the world. Aristotle carried it back even to eternity. Parmenides, Pythagoras, and the Chaldeans, were of the same opinion; and there are not wanting philosophers of the present age, who have adopted the same idea. Dr. Thompson has published two treatises on this subject; the one entitled the Eternity of the World, and the other the Eternity of the Universe. But the generality of philosophers, as well as divines and historians, have always held an origin of it; though where to fix that origin is the difficulty. The different systems of the chronology of the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Jews, the Hebrew text, and the Septuagint version, of Scaliger, of Pezron, of Sir Isaac Newton, &c. to say nothing of the Chinese annals, leave the point considerably embarrassed. Dion Pezron thought he merited well of: the public by adding two thousand years to the age of the world, which had been taken from it by Scaliger and others; but this did not hinder F. Montianay from entering a prosecution against him in the archbishop's court of Paris, for heresy. His crime was, following the Heathen rather than the Hebrew chronology; in which, however, he was preceded by the generality of the fathers and primitive writers of the church; among whom it appears to have been a common practice, to make five thousand five hundred years between the creation and the incarnation. In reality, the Jews are charged with having corrupted their chronology, by which the moderns have been misled,

EXTRAVAGANT CLAIMS OF NATIONS TO ANTIQUITY.

THERE is scarcely a nation under heaven but lays claim to a greater degree of antiquity than the rest of its neighbours. The Scythians, the Phrygians, the Chaldeans, Egyptians, Greeks, Chinese, &c. pretend each to have the honour of being the first inhabitants of the earth. Several of these nations, lest they should be outstripped in their pretensions by any of the rest, have traced up their origin long before the received account of the creation. Hence the appellations, Aborigines, Indigenæ, Antebunares, &c. The Athenians pretended to be Autocthones; and, what is remarkable, Socrates himself gave them this ridiculous appellation; which, as some other philosophers justly observed, only put them on a level with ants and grasshoppers.

The Chaldeans pretend to astronomical observations of four hundred and seventy thousand, or four hundred and seventy-three thousand years; they mention the precise king who reigned over them at the time of the deluge; whose name was Xisuthrus, and attribute to him several things which we ascribe to Noah. The Chaldaic antiquities of Berosus are lost, except a few fragments which have been collected by Joseph Scaliger, and since more fully by Fabricius. St. Augustine laughs at the folly of the Egyptians, who pretend to observations of the stars above one hundred thousand years old; in effect, no people appear to have been warmer in the contest for antiquity than those of Egypt. They pretend two periods of time; one shorter, during which the throne of Egypt had been filled by men; the other,

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almost infinite, wherein gods and demi-gods had worn the crown. From Isis and Osiris to Alexander they reckon a space of twenty-three thousand years; the time before that, while the gods reigned, made forty-two thousand nine hundred and eighty-four years more; the whole duration, from the beginning of the monarchy, amounting to sixty-five thousand nine hundred and eighty-four. The computation of their dynasties, as given by Manetho, extends to five thousand five hundred and fifty years before Alexander's time; and the Egyptian chronicle, cited by Syncellus, goes farther, reckoning 36,525 years! Diogenes Laertius makes no less than 48,863 years from the reign of Vulcan! Yet the Scythians, the Phrygians, Ethiopians, and some others, still insisted on their priority to the Egyptians. It is no wonder their catalogues should be ridiculously incredible, when the Egyptians made their first kings reign 1200 years apiece, and the Assyrians theirs about 4000.

But the Chinese pretend to the most ancient monarchy in the universe, having cultivated the sciences from the earliest ages, and subsisted at least these four thousand years, with the same laws, manners, and usages. Some indeed have called in question the authenticity of the Chinese annals; yet we find them confirmed, at least as high as 660 years before Christ, by the annals of Japan. Dr. Chambers argues, that, "at worst, the Chinese antiquities stand on as good a footing as those of either Greece or Rome. Their anualists, he adds, both for order and chronology, are not inferior to any of those ancients so much admired among us, but far surpass them in point of antiquity, and have a better title to be credited, as having been written by public authority, which can be said of few Greek or Roman pieces, except perhaps the Capitoline marbles, which are not properly a history."

But here we cannot help differing from the Doctor: for public authority is by no means the best of guardians for historical truth, especially in a country where this authority is placed in the hands of an absolute monarch, and where learning in monopolized by the priests. But the whole of the Chinese chronology has been successfully attacked by Mr. Costar.

The British have also laid claim to very high antiquity; but before Cæsar's invasion their history is utterly dubious, not to say fabulous. Old chronicles speak of Samothes, the son of Japhet, as the founder of the British monarchy. Albion, a descendant of Cham, invaded it three hundred years after; and about six hundred years after this, Brute, the son of Æneas, came and took possession of the island in the year of the world 2880, giving it the name which it still retains, and which it had when Cæsar made his first attempt. This is Geoffrey of Monmouth's system of the antiquity of the British nation. It has been defended by A. Thomson of Queen's college, in the preface to his English translation of that writer.

It must not be forgotten that the Irish also pretend to be the most ancient of all nations; they trace their origin without interruption up to Japhet! And our ancient Scots historians have not been much behind-hand with them, as they trace their origin from an elder branch of the Scythians, the first of men, and from a mixture of Scythians, Greeks, Jews, and Egyptians, who emigrated under the command of

Gathelus the son of Cecrops, king of Athens, who married Scota, the daughter of Pharaoh, king of Egypt in the time of Moses.

BUCEPHALUS.

THIS was the name of the horse of Alexander the Great, which was killed in the action with Porus, after crossing that river. Others say, this horse died of age, thirty years old; and not in the battle, but some time after. Hesychius says, his being marked on the buttock with the head of a horse, gave rise to his name. This animal, which had so long shared the toils and dangers of his master, had formerly received signal marks of royal regard. Having disappeared in the county of Uxii, Alexander issued a proclamation, commanding his horse to be restored, otherwise he would ravage the whole country with fire and sword. This command was immediately obeyed. "So dear," says Arrian, "was Bucephalus to Alexander, and so terrible was Alexander to the barbarians,"

HISTORY OF BAKERS.

THE learned are in great doubt about the time when bakers were first introduced, and baking became a particular profession. It is, however, generally agreed that they had their rise in the East, and passed from Greece to Italy, after the war with Pyrrhus, about the year of Rome 558. Till then, every housewife was her own baker; for the word pistor, which we find in Roman authors before that time, signified a person who ground or pounded the grain in a mill or mortar, to prepare it for baking, as Varro observes. According to Athenæus, the Cappadocians were the most applauded bakers, after them the Lydians, then the Phoenicians.

To the foreign bakers brought into Rome were added a number of freedmen, who were incorporated into a body, or, as they called it, a college, from which neither they nor their children were allowed to withdraw. They held their effects in common, and could not dispose of any part of them. Each bakehouse had a patroness, who had the superintendency; and these patroni elected one out of their number each year, who had superintended once over all the rest, and who had the care of the college. Out of the body of the bakers, now and then one was admitted among the senators. To preserve honour and-ho-. nesty in the college of bakers, they were expressly prohibited all alliance with comedians and gladiators: each had his shop or bakehouse, and they were distributed into fourteen regions of the city. They were excused from guardianship and other offices, which might divert them from their employment.

By statute 22 Hen. VIII. c. 13, bakers are declared not to be handicrafts. No man, for using the mysteries or sciences of baking, brewing, surgery, or writing, shall be interpreted an handicraft. The bakers were a brotherhood in England before 1155, in the reign of king Henry II. though the white bakers were not incorporated till 1307 by king Edward III. and the brown bakers not till 1621, in king James L.'s time. The bakers of London make the nineteenth com

pany, and consists of a warden, four masters, thirty assistants, and one hundred and forty men on the livery, besides the commonalty.

The French had formerly a great baker, called grand panetier de France, who had the superintendence of all the bakers of Paris. Since the beginning of this century, they were first under the jurisdiction of the lieutenant-general de police. In some provinces the lord was the only baker in his seigneury, and kept a public oven, to which all the tenants were obliged to bring their bread! This right was called furmagium, or furmaticum, though, it rather merited the title of furtum, and made part of the bannalite.

AEROSTATION.

In the modern application of the term, aerostation signifies the art of navigating through the air, both in its principles and practice. Hence also the machines which are employed for this purpose are called aërostats, or aërostatic machines; and, on account of their round figure, air-balloons. In 1729 Bartholomew Grisman, a Jesuit of Lisbon, caused an aërostatic machine, in the form of a bird, to be constructed; and made it to ascend by means of a fire kindled under it, in the presence of the king, queen, and a great concourse of spectators. Unfortunately, in rising, it struck against a cornice, was torn, and fell to the ground. The inventor proposed renewing his experiment; but the people had denounced him to the inquisition as a sorcerer, and he withdrew into Spain, where he died in a hospital. In 1766 the honourable Henry Cavendish discovered that inflammable air, (hydrogen gas) was at least seven times as light as the common air. It soon afterwards occurred to the celebrated Dr. Black, that if a thin bag were filled with this gaseous substance, it would, according to the established laws of specific gravity, rise in the common atmosphere; but he did not pursue the inquiry. The same idea was next conceived by Mr. Cavallo, to whom is generally ascribed the honour of commencing the experiments on this subject. He had made but little progress, however, in these experiments, when the discovery of Stephen and John Montgolfier, paper-manufacturers of France, was announced in 1782, and engaged the attention of the philosophical world. Observing the natural ascent of smoke and clouds in the atmosphere, these artists were led to suppose that heated air, if enclosed in a suitable covering, would prove buoyant. Accordingly, after several smaller experiments, by which this idea was fully confirmed, they inflated a large balloon with rarefied air, on June 5, 1783, which immediately and rapidly rose to the height of six thousand feet, and answered their most sanguine expectations.

Mr. Montgolfier repeated an experiment with a machine of his construction, before the commissaries of the Academy of Sciences, on the eleventh and twelfth of September. This machine was forty-seven feet high, and about forty-three feet in diameter. When distended, it appeared spheroidical. It was made of canvass, covered with paper both within and without, and it weighed one thousand pounds. The operation of filling it with rarefied air, produced by means of the combustion of fifty pounds of dry straw and twelve pounds of chopped

wool, was performed in about nine minutes; and its force of ascension, when inflated, was so great, that it raised eight men, who held it, some feet from the ground. This machine was so much damaged by the rain, that it was found necessary to prepare another for exhibition, before the king and royal family, on the nineteenth. This new machine consisted of cloth, made of linen and cotton thread, and was painted with water colours both within and without. Its height was nearly sixty feet, and its diameter about 13 feet. Having made the necessary preparations for inflating it, the operation was begun about one o'clock on the nineteenth of September, before the king and queen, the court, and all the Parisians who could procure a conveyance to Versailles. In eleven minutes it was sufficiently distended, and the ropes being cut, it ascended, bearing up with it a wicker cage, in which were a sheep, a cock, and a duck. Its power of ascension, or the weight by which it was lighter than an equal bulk of common air, allowing for the cage and animals, was 696 pounds. This balloon rose to about 1440 feet; and being driven by the wind, it descended gradually, and fell gently in a wood, at the distance of 10,200 feet from Versailles, after remaining in the atmosphere eight minutes. The animals in the cage were safely landed. The sheep was found feeding; the cock had received some hurt on one of his wings, probably from a kick of the sheep; the duck was perfectly well.

The success of this experiment induced M. Pilatre de Rozier, with a philosophical intrepidity which will be recorded with applause in the history of aërostation, to offer himself as the first adventurer in this aërial navigation. Mr. Montgolfier constructed a new machine for this purpose in a garden in the Fauxbourg St. Antoine. Its shape was oval; its diameter being about forty-eight feet, and its height about seventy-four feet. To the aperture at the bottom was annexed a wicker gallery, about three feet broad, with a ballustrade about three feet high. From the middle of the aperture was suspended by chains, which came down from the sides of the machine, an iron grate or brazier, in which a fire was lighted for inflating the machine, and port-holes were opened in the gallery, towards the aperture, through which any person, who should venture to ascend, might feed the fire on the grate with fuel, and regulate the dilatation of the enclosed air of the machine at pleasure. The weight of the aërostat was upwards of 1600 pounds. On the 15th of October, the fire being lighted, and the machine inflated, M. Pilatre de Rozier placed himself in the gallery, and ascended, to the astonishment of an immense number of spectators, to the height of eighty-four feet from the ground, and kept the machine afloat above four minutes, by repeatedly throwing straw and wool into the fire: the machine then descended gradually and gently, through a medium of increasing density, to the ground; and the intrepid aëronaut assured the spectators he had not experienced the least inconvenience in this aërial excursion. This experiment was repeated on the seventeenth and the nineteenth, when M. P. de Rozier, in his descent, and in order to avoid danger, by reascending, evinced to a multitude of observers, that the machine might be made to ascend and descend at the pleasure of the aeronaut, by increasing or diminishing the fire in the grate.

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