352 TRAINERS AND JOCKEYS. 



Probably their experiences will be left for future 

 historians to delineate. Yet some such account, 

 differing perhaps not greatly in its scope from what 

 we might look for from them, has been handed down 

 to us by one Martinus Scriblerus, whose cosmo- 

 politan mind and herculean frame enabled him to 

 achieve extraordinary things, in or about the year 

 1669. A few of the wonders he relates I venture to 

 describe in a form best suited to give the greatest 

 amount of information perspicuously. In his first 

 voyage (for he had many), we learn ' that he was 

 carried by a prosperous storm to a discovery of the 

 remains of the ancient Pygmen Empire; that in his 

 second he was happily shipwrecked in the land of the 

 giants, now the most humane people in the world; 

 that in his third voyage he discovered a whole king- 

 dom of philosophers, who govern by mathematics, 

 with whose admirable schemes and projects he re- 

 turned to benefit his own dear country.' In his 

 travels he tells us he visited ' the highest mountains, 

 from the Peak of Derby to the Peak of Teneriffe; and, 

 amongst others, reached the top of the Caucasus, 

 and the famous Ararat, where Noah's Ark first 

 moored; Athos and Olympus, renowned for poetical 

 fiction, as -well as Vesuvius and Etna, and the burn- 

 ing mountain of Java. But chiefly Hecla, the greatest 

 rarity in the northern regions, whence he dived into 

 the bowels of the earth, and surveyed the work of 

 nature underground, and instructed himself fully in 



