ity,
would leave parts bare which they had formerly covered. There are some
facts which give a colour to this supposition; for most of the high
mountains of the earth afford evidence of former submersion; and those
which are the highest, the Himalah, are situated in the country to which
the origin of civilization, and even the human species itself, may be
traced. The moon too, we know, has much less water than the earth: and
all those appearances of violence, which have so puzzled cosmogonists,
the topsy-turvy position in which vegetable substances are occasionally
found beneath the soil on which they grew, and the clear manifestations
of the action of water, in the formation of strata, in the undulating
forms it has left, and in the correspondent salient and retiring angles
of mountains and opposite coasts, were all caused by the disruption;
and as the moon has a smaller proportion of water than the earth, she
has also the highest mountains."

"But, father," said I, "the diameter of the earth being but four times
as large as that of the moon, how can the violent separation of so large
a portion of our planet be accounted for? Where is the mighty agent to
rend off such a mass, and throw it to thirty times the earth's diameter?"

"Upon that subject," said he, "the Lunarian sages are much divided.
Many hypotheses have been suggested on the subject, some of which are
very ingenious, and all very fanciful: but the two most celebrated, and
into which all the others are now merged, are those of Neerlego and
Darcandarca; the former of whom, in a treatise extending to nine quarto
volumes, has maintained that the disruption was caused by a comet; and
the latter, in a work yet more voluminous, has endeavoured to prove, that
when the materials of the moon composed a part of the earth, this planet
contained large masses of water, which, though the particles cohered with
each other, were disposed to fly off from the earth; and that, by an
accumulation of the electric fluid, according to laws which he has
attempted to explain, the force was at length sufficient to heave the
rocks which encompassed these masses, from their beds, and to project
them from the earth, when, partaking of the earth's diurnal motion, they
assumed a spherical form, and revolved around it. And further, that
because the moon is composed of two sorts of matter, that are differently
affected towards the earth in its revolution round that planet, the same
parts o