the Cordeliers; and the third, the summits of the mountains which over-top all the Andes. In the highest, as in the lowest, there shall be extensive beds of sands, beds of shells, petrified fishes, and all sorts of calcareous substances. The low lands are about thirty miles broad, the Cordeliers about sixty miles broad, and the Andes about the same breadth, and this from east to west. Such is this singular country; nor can it be compared to any thing more aptly than to the flats and shoals, and to the abysses and mountains, which the bottom of the neighbouring ocean discovers, on examination, by soundings.* But, waving for a moment America, and the islands of the Atlantic, cast your eye on the position of Java, Sumatra, Borneo, the Celebes, with all that is called the Archipelago, in the Chinese seas; Formosa, the Manillas, Japan, and the innumerable clusters of little islands. Observe then New Britain, New Holland, and all the islands in the Southern Ocean; what vast remains of former countries; for remains they most probably are, excepting, indeed, such as have been formed by volcanos. One instance will be convincing. Cooke took with him to New Zealand, a Taiëtian, called *Don Ulloa. called Tupia. This man found that the New Zealanders spoke the same language with himself, and that they practised the same religious rites. The distance of these countries, one from the other, is, notwithstanding, 43 degrees, or 2580 miles. For curiosity, attend to the few following words: This is an analogy too strong to admit of any doubt of some common original. It likewise would lead one to suppose that an uninterrupted continent 4 continent might have existed between New Zealand and Taïta. And what is still more extraordinary, that New Zealand and New Holland must always have been distinct, as the difference is total, both in languages, customs, and religion.* In the year 1722, Rogéwin discovered an island in the Pacific Ocean, in lat. 27o, 6', and about one hundred leagues from Chili. This island, about 50 miles in circumference, had about 3000 inhabitants. But, what made it remarkable, were the colossal statues, which were found in it, and to which the people rendered a species of homage, though not of adoration. In 1770, Philip Gonzales anchored at the same island, saw these same colossal figures, and measured them. Cooke landed here in 1774, and could not comprehend how a people, without the smallest knowledge of sculpture, or of any of the arts, and without any visible quarries of stone, could, in the midst of the Pacific, have erected such statues, Cooke gives us the drawings of these figures; they are precisely the same with those of Peru. He found the language the same as that of Taïti, though it is 2400 miles from Taïti, and the same as New Zealand, from which it is distant 4980 miles. Hence he concluded that this eastern island, and the others, VOL. IV. N • Carli, others had one origin. He found the ruins of large edifices, likewise here, which had been erected in stone, in like manner with the public buildings of Peru. These were surely then built by a people anterior to the present race of inhabitants. In the 101st year after the flood, is said to have happened the building of Babel, the confusion of tongues, and the dispersion of mankind; and about the same time Noah is supposed to have parted from his rebellious offspring, and led a colony of the more tractable into the East; and there, either he, or one of his successors, to have founded the empire of China.* But, how this was, I know not. It is not easily to be conjectured how empires were founded in the progressive dispersion of the Noachida. Nothing is so feasible, as the transformation of a physical or moral truth, into a theological or poetic error. False conceptions often deform pure ideas. The rarity of vigorous and sound judgment occasions preposterous applications. This, however, is curious, as we shall afterwards more fully see, that the immediate descendants of Noah called themselves children of the Sun. The great characters of antiquity looking upon this luminary as the soul of the world, were always proud to be derived from him. Ja-phtas, or Japhet, Universal History. Japhet, in Hebrew, signifies the soul of nature, and, in another sense, the sun. Sem, or Shem, is the appellation of the sun, considered as the regulator of times and seasons. Cham, or Ham, is the name of the vivifying quality of the sun. Thus, the names of the three sons of Noah, the renovators of the human race, were all immediately derived from the sun. From the Persians, you know, has proceeded an usage which may be considered, at this day, as an analogy. The sovereign Mahommedan Princes of the East, instead of their patronymic, always sign Byze, which signifies the sun. It is a fact well known, that the ancients personified the elements. The ætherial mass was stiled Jupiter, and he was armed with thunder and lightning; the air, his sister and bosom companion, was stiled Juno; the body of waters, Neptune; the earth, Pluto. Heat and cold, moisture and dryness, were conceived to be their creative and their destructive properties; and hence the poetical imagination of elemental sexes, marriages, &c. Water, which holds a middle station betwixt earth and air, and which, from its volatility on the access of fire, and its density in its absence, is susceptible of various changes, was thence designed N 2 |