ned, have equal claims to attention, and equal
chance for correctness. Thus it is recorded by the Brahmins in the pages
of their inspired Shastah, that the angel Bistnoo transformed himself into
a great boar, plunged into the watery abyss, and brought up the earth on
his tusks. Then issued from him a mighty tortoise and a mighty snake; and
Bistnoo placed the snake erect upon the back of the tortoise, and he
placed the earth upon the head of the snake.[16]

The negro philosophers of Congo affirm, that the world was made by the
hands of angels, excepting their own country, which the Supreme Being
constructed himself that it might be supremely excellent. And he took
great pains with the inhabitants, and made them very black and beautiful;
and when he had finished the first man, he was well pleased with him, and
smoothed him over the face, and hence his nose, and the nose of all his
descendants, became flat.

The Mohawk philosophers tell us, that a pregnant woman fell down from
heaven, and that a tortoise took her upon its back, because every place
was covered with water; and that the woman, sitting upon the tortoise,
paddled with her hands in the water, and raked up the earth, whence it
finally happened that the earth became higher than the water.[17]

But I forbear to quote a number more of these ancient and outlandish
philosophers, whose deplorable ignorance, in despite of all their
erudition, compelled them to write in languages which but few of my
readers can understand; and I shall proceed briefly to notice a few more
intelligible and fashionable theories of their modern successors.

And, first, I shall mention the great Buffon, who conjectures that this
globe was originally a globe of liquid fire, scintillated from the body of
the sun, by the percussion of a comet, as a spark is generated by the
collision of flint and steel. That at first it was surrounded by gross
vapors, which, cooling and condensing in process of time, constituted,
according to their densities, earth, water, and air, which gradually
arranged themselves, according to their respective gravities, round the
burning or vitrified mass that formed their center.

Hutton, on the contrary, supposes that the waters at first were
universally paramount; and he terrifies himself with the idea that the
earth must be eventually washed away by the force of rain, rivers, and
mountain torrents, until it is confounded with the ocean, or, in other
words, absolutel