Epitome of the Progress of Natural Science. 51 



most obvious of the sciences, we naturally inquire how far that 

 period is consistent with the most ancient historical notices of the 

 origin of society. And here we observe a remarkable agreement 

 in the records of two of those nations. The Hebrew text in Gen- 

 esis, according to the most received chronology, giving 2349 

 years B. C, as the period of a great deluge which almost extir- 

 pated every Hving thing from the face of the earth, and the 

 Chinese records assigning the period of 2384 years B. C, to the 

 same event. It was about that period Confucius, their philosopher, 

 represents their first king Yao, as occupied in draining the wa- 

 ters which had ascended to the tops of the mountains. So that 

 if we consider this as the last period when the earth submitted 

 to the mastery of the waters, we find a period of about fifteen 

 hundred years, to assign to the renovation of the human race, 

 before man became sufficiently civihzed to note the occultation 

 of the heavenly bodies. It is to be remarked, that the earliest 

 notices we have of the great nations that have been mentioned, 

 represent them as settled on extensive plains of great fertility, 

 capable of affording them abundant subsistence, and intersected, 

 as they were, by navigable streams, of exchanging their com- 

 modities with distant settlements, and thus laying a foundation 

 for commercial habits. Such has at all times been the discrimi- 

 nating providence of man ; congregating vpon the fertile alluvial 

 soils of the great drainages of the country, and rejecting his sur- 

 plus population, upon the less productive lands of greater eleva- 

 tion. The Indians were thus settled on the rich plains of the 

 Ganges; the Babylonians on the Delta of the Euphrates; the 

 Egyptians along the banks of the Nile. But the elevated sandy 

 plains, to the flanks of which these alluvial soils extended, were 

 the homes of an unquiet pastoral people, whose continual irrup- 

 tions were fatal to the arts of peace. We find the early history 

 of China agitated by the invasions of the Tartar hordes ; that of 

 India by the Mongols ; of Babylonia by the Assyrians, and of 

 Egypt by the people of the Shepherd Kings, from whose do- 

 minion she was redeemed by Sesostris. When we remember how 

 effectually science and literature were oppressed, by the irrup- 

 tion of the same barbarous nations into Europe, towards the close 

 of the Roman empire, we can imagine how fatal the eflfects of 

 similar movements must have been, upon the first dawnings of 

 social improvement. We find here a sufficient cause for the 



