s project is by lighthouses, and
explosion of bombs at a certain hour."

The plan was certainly impracticable; but Whiston and Ditton might have
retorted that they were nearer to the longitude than their satirist to the
kingdom of heaven, or even to a bishopric. Arbuthnot, I think, here and
elsewhere, reveals himself as the calculator who kept Swift right in his
proportions in the matter of the Lilliputians, Brobdingnagians, etc. Swift
was very ignorant about things connected with number. He writes to Stella
that he has discovered that leap-year comes every four years, and that all
his life he had thought it came every three years. Did he begin with the
mistake of Caesar's priests? Whether or no, when I find the person who did
not understand leap-year inventing satellites of Mars in correct accordance
with Kepler's third law, I feel sure he must have had help.

THE AURORA BOREALIS.

An essay concerning the late apparition in the heavens on the 6th of
March. Proving by mathematical, logical, and moral arguments, that it
cou'd not have been produced meerly by the ordinary course of nature,
but must of necessity be a prodigy. Humbly offered to the consideration
of the Royal Society. London, 1716, 8vo.

The prodigy, as described, was what we should call a very decided and
unusual aurora borealis. The inference was, that men's sins were bringing
on the end of the world. The author thinks that if one of the old
"threatening prophets" were then alive, he would give "something like the
following." I quote a few sentences of the notion which the author had of
the way in which Ezekiel, for instance, would have addressed his Maker in
the reign of George the First:

"Begin! Begin! O Sovereign, for once, with an {135} effectual clap of
thunder.... O Deity! either thunder to us no more, or when you thunder, do
it home, and strike with vengeance to the mark.... 'Tis not enough to raise
a storm, unless you follow it with a blow, and the thunder without the
bolt, signifies just nothing at all.... Are then your lightnings of so
short a sight, that they don't know how to hit, unless a mountain stands
like a barrier in their way? Or perhaps so many eyes open in the firmament
make you lose your aim when you shoot the arrow? Is it this? No! but, my
dear Lord, it is your custom never to take hold of your arms till you have
first bound round your majestic countenance with gathered mists and
clouds."

The p