OF VICISSITUDE OF THINGS 139 



* That all novelty is but oblivion/ Whereby you may see 

 that the river of Lethe runneth as well above ground 

 as below. There is an abstruse astrologer that saith, c if it 

 were not for two things that are constant, (the one is, that 

 the fixed stars ever stand at like distance one from another, 

 and never come nearer together, nor go further asunder ; 

 the other, that the diurnal motion perpetually keepeth 

 time,) no individual would last one moment.' Certain it 

 is, that the matter is in a perpetual flux, and never at a 

 stay. The great winding-sheets, that bury all things in 

 oblivion, are two ; deluges and earthquakes. As for 

 conflagrations and great droughts, they do not merely 

 dispeople and destroy. Phaeton's car went but a day. 

 And the three years' drought in the time of Elias 

 was but particular, and left people alive. As for the great 

 burnings by lightnings, which are often in the West 

 Indies, they are but narrow. But in the other two 

 destructions, by deluge and earthquake, it is further to be 

 noted, that the remnant of people which hap to be 

 reserved, are commonly ignorant and mountainous people, 

 that can give no account of the time past; so that the 

 oblivion is all one as if none had been left. If you con- 

 sider well of the people of the West Indies, it is very 

 probable that they are a newer or a younger people than 

 the people of the old world. And it is much more likely 

 that the destruction that hath heretofore been there, was 

 not by earthquakes (as the Aegyptian priest told Solon 

 concerning the island of Atlantis, ' that it was swallowed 

 by an earthquake ') but rather that it was desolated by 

 a particular deluge. For earthquakes are seldom in those 

 parts. But on the other side, they have such pouring 

 rivers, as the rivers of Asia and Africk and Europe are 

 but brooks to them. Their Andes likewise, or mountains, 

 are far higher than those with us ; whereby it seems that 

 the remnants of generation of men were in such a particular 

 deluge saved. As for the observation that Machiavel 

 hath, that the jealousy of sects doth much extinguish the 

 memory of things ; traducing Gregory the Great, that he 

 did what in him lay to extinguish all heathen antiquities ; 



