general catastrophes, it would next be inferred that the human race had been as often destroyed and renovated. And since every extermination was assumed to be penal, it could only be reconciled with divine justice, by the supposition that man, at each successive creation, was regenerated in a state of purity and innocence.

A very large portion of Asia, inhabited by the earliest nations whose traditions have come down to us, has been always subject to tremendous earthquakes. Of the geographical boundaries of these, and their effects, I shall speak in the proper place. Egypt has, for the most part, been exempt from this scourge, and the Egyptian doctrine of great catastrophes was probably derived in part, as before hinted, from early geological observations, and in part from Eastern nations.

In the Egyptian and Eastern cosmogonies, and in the Greek version of them, no very definite meaning can, in general, be attached to the term 'destruction of the world;' for sometimes it would seem almost to imply the annihilation of our planetary system, and at others a mere revolution of the surface of the earth.*

Opinions of the Greeks.-Anaximander. In the 8th book of Plutarch's Symposiacon or Convivial Conversations,' the question is raised why the Pythagoreans were averse to eating fish, and it is considered whether the prejudice may have had an Egyptian, or a Syrian, or an ancient Greek source. One of the party alludes to the doctrine of Anaximander that Men were in the beginning engendered in fish, and after they had been nourished and had become able to shift for themselves, they were cast out and took to the land.'

It is not inconsistent with the Hindoo mythology to suppose that Pythagoras might have found in the East not only the system of universal and violent catastrophes and periods of repose in endless succession, but also that of periodical revolutions, effected by the continued agency of ordinary causes. For Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, the first, second, and third persons of the Hindoo triad, severally represented the Creative, the Preserving, and the

Destroying powers of the Deity. The coexistence of these three attributes, all in simultaneous operation, might well accord with the notion of perpetual but partial alterations finally bringing about a complete change. But the fiction expressed in the verses before quoted from Menù of eternal vicissitudes in the vigils and slumbers of Bramah seems accommodated to the system of great general catastrophes followed by new creations and periods of repose.

A suggestion is then made that, as fish were the parents of mankind, Anaximander may have objected to the use of them as food. Such allusions to an ancient doctrine by no means warrant us in assuming that Anaximander had really taught that men should abstain, from such a motive, from eating fish, but they are curious as affording evidence that the Milesian philosopher really believed that men originally sprang from fish. Unfortunately all the works of Anaximander, the pupil of Thales, are lost. He was born 610 years before Christ, and is said to have been the first who left a philosophical treatise in writing. It is only from a few brief citations scattered through the pages of later authors, that we learn anything of his opinions. Eusebius quotes from a lost work of Plutarch called ErрwμаTEîs or patchwork,' the following words: 'Man, according to Anaximander, must have been born from animals of a different form (¿§ àλλodov Ców); for whereas other animals easily get their food by themselves, man alone requires long rearing; and no one being such as he was originally, could have been preserved.'*

6

In another work of Plutarch we read as follows: 'Anaximander taught that the first animals (тà Tρwτa (wa) were begotten in moisture, and were covered with prickly integuments, but as they grew older they came out into the dry land, and their integuments were rent asunder.† Censorinus, in his work De Die Natali,' says that, according to Anaximander, either fish, or animals very like fish, sprang from heated water and earth, and that the human fœtuses grew in these animals to a state of puberty, so that when at length they burst, men and women capable of nourishing themselves proceeded from them.‡ Full justice cannot, probably, be done to the views of this ancient author by reference to the few meagre fragments of his writings which have alone come down to us, but we trace the same idea running through all of them, namely, the peculiar helplessness of the human infant, making it natural to suppose that there must have been a connection between the embryonic condition of the chap. 19.

* Euseb. Εὐαγγελικής προπαρ. 1-8. De placidis Philosophorum, book v.

Censorinus De Die Natali IV.

first human beings and some previously existing animals. Anaximander evidently took for granted that man was not created in an adult or fully developed state, and in so doing he made at least some slight approach, twenty-five centuries before our time, to the modern doctrine of evolution. But none of the above passages warrant the conclusion that the Greek philosopher had anticipated the Lamarckian theory of progressive development. Yet H. Ritter, writing in 1819,* represents him as having taught that after the first imperfect and short-lived creatures had been engendered in slime, an advance took place from the lower to the higher grades of life, until at length man was formed; and Cuvier, usually so accurate, but who seems never in this instance to have consulted the original texts, went a step beyond Ritter, and said in 1841, 'Anaximander pretended that men had been first fish, then reptiles, then mammalia, and lastly what they now are.' 'A system,' he adds, which we find reproduced in times very near to our own, and even in the nineteenth century.'+

. Pythagorean Doctrines.-Pythagoras (580? B.c.), who resided for more than twenty years in Egypt, and, according to Cicero, had visited the East, and conversed with the Persian philosophers, introduced into his own country, on his return, the doctrine of the gradual deterioration of the human race from an original state of virtue and happiness; but if we are to judge of his theory concerning the destruction and renovation of the earth from the sketch given by Ovid, we must concede it to have been far more philosophical than any known version of the cosmogonies of Oriental or Egyptian sects.

Although Pythagoras is introduced by the poet as deliver

Ersch and Gruber's Encyclopedia, article Anaximander.

Quoiquil en soit, Anaximandre ayant admis l'eau comme le second principe de la Nature, pretendait que les hommes avaient primitivement été poissons, puis reptiles, puis mammifers et enfin ce qu'ils sont maintenant, nous retrouverons ce système dans des temps très rapprochés des notres et même dans

le dix-neuvième Siècle.-Cuvier, Hist. des Sciences Naturelles, tome i. p. 91. 1841.

Lamarck and Geoffroy St. Hilaire are evidently here alluded to: they had derived their theory of progressive development from geological data, the former having published his opinions in 1801, and G. St. Hilaire in 1828.

ing his doctrine in person, some of the illustrations are derived from natural events which happened after the death of the philosopher. But notwithstanding these anachronisms, we may regard the account as a true picture of the tenets of the Pythagorean school in the Augustan age; and although perhaps partially modified, it must have contained the substance of the original scheme. Thus considered, it is extremely curious and instructive; for we here find a comprehensive summary of almost all the great causes of change now in activity on the globe, and these adduced in confirmation of a principle of a perpetual and gradual revolution inherent in the nature of our terrestrial system. These doctrines, it is true, are not directly applied to the explanation of geological phenomena; or, in other words, no attempt is made to estimate what may have been in past ages, or what may hereafter be, the aggregate amount of change brought about by such never-ending fluctuations. Had this been the case, we might have been called upon to admire so extraordinary an anticipation with no less interest than astronomers, when they endeavour to define by what means the Samian philosopher came to the knowledge of the Copernican system.

Let us now examine the celebrated passages to which we have been adverting* :—

"Nothing perishes in this world; but things merely vary and change their form. To be born, means simply that a thing begins to be something different from what it was before; and dying, is ceasing to be the same thing. Yet, although nothing retains long the same image, the sum of the whole remains constant.' These general propositions are then confirmed by a series of examples, all derived from natural appearances, except the first, which refers to the golden age giving place to the age of iron. The illustrations are thus consecutively adduced.

1. Solid land has been converted into sea.

2. Sea has been changed into land. Marine shells lie far distant from the deep, and the anchor has been found on the summit of hills.

3. Valleys have been excavated by running water, and floods have washed down hills into the sea.*

4. Marshes have become dry ground.

5. Dry lands have been changed into stagnant pools.

6. During earthquakes some springs have been closed up, and new ones have broken out. channels, and have been re-born in Greece, and Mysus in Asia.

Rivers have deserted their elsewhere; as the Erasinus

7. The waters of some rivers, formerly sweet, have become bitter; as those of the Anigris in Greece, &c.t

8. Islands have become connected with the main land by the growth of deltas and new deposits; as in the case of Antissa joined to Lesbos, Pharos to Egypt, &c.

9. Peninsulas have been divided from the main land, and have become islands, as Leucadia; and according to tradition Sicily, the sea having carried away the isthmus.

10. Land has been submerged by earthquakes; the Grecian cities of Helice and Buris, for example, are to be seen under the sea, with their walls inclined.

11. Plains have been upheaved into hills by the confined air seeking vent, as at Trozene in the Peloponnesus.

12. The temperature of some springs varies at different periods. The water of others are inflammable. Some streams make the hair to resemble amber and gold, others influence the mind as well as the body, having some of them an exciting, others a soporific effect.

13. There are streams which have a petrifying power, and convert the substances which they touch into marble.

14. Extraordinary medicinal and deleterious effects are produced by water of different lakes and springs.§

15. Some rocks and islands, after floating and having been

* Eluvie mons est deductus in æquor,' v. 267. The meaning of this last verse is somewhat obscure; but taken with the context, may be supposed to allude to the abrading power of floods, torrents, and rivers.

The impregnation from new mineral springs, caused by earthquakes in volcanic countries, is perhaps here alluded

to.

That is probably an allusion to the escape of inflammable gas, like that in the district of Baku, west of the Caspian; at Pietramala, in the Tuscan Apennines; and several other places.

§ Many of those described seem fanciful fictions, like the exaggerated virtues still attributed to some mineral waters.