Curiosities of Science. 125 



here lumps of native gold ; in that year a lump of twenty-four 

 pounds was met with ; and in 1843 a lump weighing about 

 seventy-eight pounds English was found, and is now deposited 

 with others in the Museum of the Imperial School of Mines at 

 St. Petersburg. 



SIR ISAAC NEWTON UPON SUBNET'S THEOEY OF THE EARTH. 



In 1668, Dr. Thomas Burnet printed his Theoria Telluris 

 Sacra, "an eloquent physico-theological romance," says Sir 

 David Brewster, " which was to a certain extent adopted even 

 by Newton, Burnet's friend. Abandoning, as some of the 

 fathers had done, the hexaemeron, or six days of Moses, as a 

 physical reality, and having no knowledge of geological pheno- 

 mena, he gives loose reins to his imagination, combining pass- 

 ages of Scripture with those of ancient authors, and presump- 

 tuously describing the future catastrophes to which the earth 

 is to be exposed." Previous to its publication, Burnet pre- 

 sented a copy of his book to Newton, and requested his opinion 

 of the theory which it propounded. Newton took "exceptions 

 to particular passages," and a correspondence ensued. In one 

 of Newton's letters he treats of the formation of the earth, and 

 the other planets, out of a general chaos of the figure assumed 

 by the earth, of the length of the primitive days, of the for- 

 mation of hills and seas, and of the creation of the two ruling 

 lights as the result of the clearing up of the atmosphere. He 

 considers the account of the creation in Genesis as adapted 

 to the judgment of the vulgar. " Had Moses," he says, " de- 

 scribed the processes of creation as distinctly as they were in 

 themselves, he would have made the narrative tedious and con- 

 fused amongst the vulgar, and become a philosopher more than 

 a prophet." After referring to several u causes of meteors, such 

 as the breaking out of vapours from below, before the earth 

 was well hardened, the settling and shrinking of the whole 

 globe after the upper regions or surface began to be hard," 

 Newton closes his letter with an apology for being tedious, 

 which, he says, "he has the more reason to do, as he has not 

 set down any thing he has well considered, or will undertake to 

 defend." See the Letter in the Appendix to Sir D. Brewster's 

 Life of Newton, vol. ii. 



The primitive condition of the earth, and its preparation for man, 

 was a subject of general speculation at the close of the seventeenth cen- 

 tury. Leibnitz, like his great rival (Newton), attempted to explain the 

 formation of the earth, and of the different substances which composed 

 jt ; and he had the advantage of possessing some knowledge of geolo- 

 gical phenomena : the earth he regarded as having been originally a 

 burning mass, whose temperature gradually diminished till the vapours 

 were condensed into a universal ocean, which covered the highest moun- 



