VOL. XVII.] PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. 549 



falls sometimes in a considerable quantity, but rarely continues there above a 

 day or two ; their spring is about a month earlier than in England. May and 

 June the heat increases, and it is much like our summer, being mitigated with 

 gentle breezes, that rise about Q o'clock and decrease and incline as the sun 

 rises and falls. July and August those breezes cease, and the air becomes stag- 

 nant, so that the heat is violent and troublesome. In September the weather 

 usually breaks suddenly and then very considerable rains fall. 



There are frequent little sorts of whirl-winds, sometimes not above 2 or 3 

 yards diameter, sometimes 40, which whisking round in a circle, pass along 

 the earth, according to the motion of the cloud from whence they issue ; and 

 as they pass along, with their circular motion they carry aloft the dry leaves 

 into the air, which fall again often in places far remote. I have seen them 

 descend in a calm sun-shine day, as if they had come from the heavens in great 

 showers ; so that all the elements seemed filled with them. And I could per- 

 ceive them to descend from on high as far as I could possibly discern a leaf. 



Account of Dr. Burnet's Book, intituled, Archeologi^ Philosophic^, site Doctrina 

 Antiqua de Rerum Originibus. Libri duo. Lond. 1692. N°201,p. 796. 

 In this treatise the author endeavours to discover what were the sentiments 

 of the ancients concerning the origin or beginnings of this visible world, of 

 which he conceives men in all ages have had a true, if not a divine knowledge, 

 as well as of a divine power, and of the intermediate order, vicissitudes, and 

 ends of all things. And that Pythagoras was not the inventor of the mundane 

 system ascribed to him, but the conveyor only of it from the Orientals, 

 «7rofftj^a, to the Grecian schools, where yet it received lesser improvement as 

 to particular explications, than it has by the modern inquiries. He endeavours 

 to prove, that most of the ancients held very much the same notion concern- 

 ing the beginning of things, with that deliverexi by Moses in the beginning of 

 his writings, with which, he conceives, also that his already published theory 

 is consonant. It was his design also to hnve written a general body of philo- 

 sophy, but the sense of his age and approaching death seems to have made him 

 desist, and to satisfy himself with what he has hitherto performed in the pre- 

 ceding books, and in this which he seems to make the seal and consummation 

 of the former. 



He divides the whole discourse into two books. In the first he endeavours 

 to discover what were the most ancient doctrines of all nations concerning 

 the beginnings of things, in general. But in the second he endeavours to 

 collect all such passages among them, as seemed most consonant to, and 

 confirming of the doctrines delivered in the first part of his theory, where he 



VOL. III. 4 A 



