120 HISTORY OF 



quakes ; and still a fourth, with much more plau- 

 sibility than the rest, ascribing them entirely to 

 the fluctuations of the deep, which he supposes, 

 in the beginning, to have covered the whole 

 earth. Such as are pleased with disquisitions of 

 this kind, may consult Burnet, Whiston, Wood- 

 ward, or BufFon. Nor would I be thought to 

 decry any mental amusements, that at worst keep 

 us innocently employed ; but, for my own part, 

 I cannot help wondering how the opposite de- 

 mand has never come to be made ; and why 

 philosophers have never asked, how we come to 

 have plains ? Plains are sometimes more preju- 

 dicial to man than mountains. Upon plains, an 

 inundation has greater power ; the beams of the 

 sun are often collected there with suffocating 

 fierceness ; they are sometimes found desert for 

 several hundred miles together, as in the country 

 east of the Caspian Sea, although otherwise fruit- 

 ful, merely because there are no risings nor de- 

 pressions to form reservoirs, or collect the small- 

 est rivulet of water. The most rational answer, 

 therefore, why either mountains or plains were 

 formed, seems to be, that they were thus fashion- 

 ed by the hand of Wisdom, in order that pain 

 and pleasure should be so contiguous, as that 

 mortality might be exercised either in bearing the 

 one, or communicating the other. 



Indeed, the more I consider this dispute res- 

 pecting the formation of mountains, the more I am 

 struck with the futility of the question. There 

 is neither a straight line, nor an exact superficies, 

 in all nature. If we consider a circle, even with 



