grew. Thus, verily, took place the creation as the earth came into being. 'Earth,' said they; and the earth existed. Like a fog, like a cloud was its formation; as huge fishes rise in the water, so rose the mountains; and in a moment the high mountains existed."

The foregoing extract is from the history of the first creation. It can not be necessary to point out the parallels between this passage and the pictures drawn by the classic poets-especially Ovid-nor even to direct attention to the points of coincidence with the Mosaic account of chaos and incipient order. The following passage is from the account of the fourth and last creation:

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Hear, now, when it was first thought of man, and of what man should be formed. At that time spake he who gives life, and he who gives form, the Maker and Moulder, named Tepen, Gucumatz: 'The day draws near; the work is done; the supporter, the servant is ennobled; he is the son of light, the child of whiteness; man is honored; the race of man is on the earth;' so they spake. *** Immediately they began to speak of making our first mother and our father. Only of yellow corn and of white corn were their flesh, and the substance of the arms and legs of man. They were called simply beings, formed and fashioned; they had neither mother nor father; we call them simply men. Woman did not bring them forth, nor were they born of the Builder and Moulder, of Him who fecundates and of Him who gives being. But it was a miracle, an enchantment worked by the Maker and Moulder, by Him who fecundates and Him who gives being.

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Thought was in them; they saw; they looked around; their vision took in all things; they perceived the world; they cast their eyes from the sky to the earth.”

"Then they were asked by the Builder and Moulder, "What think ye of your being? See ye not? Understand

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 raisiu avec carte et figures.

CHAPTER XXXV.

SOME THOUGHTS ON PERPETUAL MOTION.

ROM the citations made in the last chapter we dis

FROM

cover 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 for

Not 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