220 Prof. Rigaud, on Newton, Whiston, 
world.” This objection necessarily* involved his being an 
atheist, and not merely a sceptic as Whiston ‘says, which shows 
again the inaccuracy of his relation. It may be from the 
fault of a bad memory, it may be from a limited extent of 
reading, but I can at this moment recall to my recollection 
no one passage, in which Halley has published anything pro- 
fane ; and I may add that in some disquisitions on the general 
deluge, which he published in the Philosophical Transactions, 
he treats the Scripture account with all due respect. ‘These 
disquisitions seem also to supply a clue to the cause of the ca- 
veat; for having reasoned on the dislocations visible on the 
earth’s surface, he subjoined an explanation of his hypothesis, 
because it was suggested to him that those changes might 
rather have happened in times before the Mosaic creation, (when 
a former world was possibly reduced to chaos, out of whose 
ruins the present might be formed,) than at the period of the 
Deluge. This, in the eyes of many religious persons, may 
then have amounted to a heinous offence; but whether it did 
so with justice may now be safely left to the determination of 
Christian geologists. The passage immediately referred to 
occurs indeed in the Philosophical Transactions for 1724; but 
Halley had treated of the Deluge in the 190th number of the 
same collection, which, having been published in 1687, makes 
it not improbable that he may then, in discussing the subject 
among his friends, have used the same topics, and have thus 
raised the storm which burst on him in 1691. But to return 
to the term originally objected to: it was proposed, in 1691, 
to send in testimonials of Halley’s character to the electors of 
the Savilian Professor; and the form, in one part, said that his 
friends recommended him from their * own long experience 
of his mathematical genius, probity, sobriety, and good life.” 
* This, perhaps, should not be assumed as a necessary consequence, lest 
injustice should be done to those philosophers, both heathen and Chris- 
tian, who, salva pietate, have entertained the notion of the eternity of the 
world as the coexistent effect of an Eternal Intelligent Cause ; the Stoics, 
for instance, Volkelius, &c. 
Writers on Natural Theology now considered as of the highest authority, 
following the example set by Crellius, are, we believe, disposed to place 
most reliance upon the arguments to be derived from the course of nature 
daily presented to the view, as being of the greatest efficacy, both with or- 
dinary minds and with those to whom abstruse questions respecting the 
materia prima, &c, may have suggested themselves. 
“Nunc id,” says Crellius, ‘quod tota Peripateticorum, imo et Platoni- 
corum schola, non modo fatetur, sed et urget, probabimus, nempe res hujus 
universi omnes finis gratid existere; sed ita, ut controversiam de materia 
primd, queecunque tandem ea sit, non faciamus nostram.”—Crellius, De Deo 
et ejus Attributis, cap. iii.,in which work he was assisted by Stanislaus Lubje- 
niecius, a Polish nobleman, the author of the Theatrum Cometicum.—R. T.] 
