or instance, a shower of quicksilver at Rome is mentioned
by Dion Cassius, in the year 197 of our era, and a similar event is
related under the reign of Aurelian. If we attend to phenomena taking
place in our time, such as a shower of blood, tremendous hail stones
weighing a pound each, and containing a stone within them; showers of
frogs, and other almost unaccountable occurrences, we must consign them
to, "the annals in which science has inserted the facts, she has
recognized as such, without as yet pretending to explain them."

Respecting the second reason, the deceptive appearance which nature
sometimes assumes, the exaggeration, almost unavoidable, by partially
informed observers, of the details of a phenomenon, or its duration;
improper, ill-understood, or badly translated expressions, figurative
language, and a practical style; erroneous explanations of emblematical
representations; apologues and allegories adopted as real facts. Such
are the causes, which, singly or together, have frequently swollen with
prodigious fictions the page of history; and it is by carefully removing
this envelope, that elucidations must be sought of what has hitherto
been improperly and disdainfully rejected. A few examples will
illustrate these several positions.

The river Adonis being impregnated, during certain seasons, with volumes
of dust raised from the red soil of that part of Mount Libanus near
which it flows, gave rise to the fable of the periodical effusion of the
blood of Adonis. There is a rock near the Island of Corfu, which bears
the resemblance of a ship under sail: the ancients adapted the story to
the phenomenon, and recognised in it the Phenician ship, in which
Ulysses returned to his country, converted into stone by Neptune, for
having carried away the slayer of his son Polyphemus. A more extensive
acquaintance with the ocean, has shown that this appearance is not
unique; a similar one on the coast of Patagonia, has more than once
deceived both French and English navigators; and rock Dunder, in the
West Indies, bears a resemblance, at a distance equally illusive. There
is another recorded by Captain Hardy, in his recent travels in Mexico,
near the shore of California; and the "story of the flying Dutchman," is
founded on a similar appearance at the Cape of Good Hope, connected with
a tradition which has been long current there among the Dutch colonists.
Another instance is afforded by the chimaera, the solution of w