592 
ARTIFICIAL HATCHING. 
what we now call the terrestrial globe was originally an unformed, 
ijidigested mass of heterogeneous matter, called chaos, and onlv the 
rudiments and materials of the present world. It does not appear 
who first broached the notion of a chaos. Moses, the earliest of all 
w'riters, derives the origin of this world from a confusion of matter, 
dark, void, deep, without form, which he calls Toku-Bohu ; which is 
exactly the chaos of the Greeks and Barbarian pliilosophers. Moses 
goes no farther than the chaos, nor tells us whence it took its origin 
or confused state ; and where Moses stops, there precisely do all 
the rest. 
Dr. Burnet endeavours to shew, that as the ancient philosophers, 
&c. who wrote of the cosmogony, acknowledged a chaos for the prin- 
ciple of their world; so the divines and writers of the theogony, 
derive the origin or generation of their fabled gods from the same 
principle. 
Mr. Whiston supposes the ancient chaos, the origin of our earth, 
to have been the atmosphere of a comet; which, all things considered, 
is not the most improbable opinion. He endeavours to make it out 
by many arguments, drawn from the agreement which appears to be 
between them. According to him, every planet is a comet, formed 
into a regular constitution, and placed at a proper distance from the 
sun, revolving in a nearly circular orbit ; and a comet is a planet, either 
beginning to be destroyed or re-made ; that is, a chaos or planet 
unformed, or in its primeval state, and placed as yet in an orbit very 
eccentric. 
Artificial Hatching. 
The art of hatching chickens by means of ovens has long been 
practised in Egypt, chiefly in a village called Berme, and its environs. 
About the beginning of autumn, the n^itives scatter themselves all over 
the country, where each undertakes the management of an oven. 
The ovens are of different sizes, but in general they contain from forty 
to eighty thousand eggs. The number of ovens is about three hundred 
and eighty-six, and they usually keep them working for about six 
months : as, therefore, each brood takes up in an oven, as under a 
hen, only twenty-one days, it is easy in every one of them to hatch 
eight different broods of chickens. Every Bermean is under the obli- 
gation of delivering to the person who trusts him with an oven, only 
two-thirds of as many chickens as there have been eggs put under his 
care; and he is a gainer by this bargain, as more than two-thirds of 
the eggs usually produce chickens. In calculating the number of 
chickens thus annually hatched in Egypt, it appears that the ovens of 
Egypt give life yearly to at least ninety-two million six hundred and 
forty thousand of these animals. 
This useful and advantageous method of hatching eggs was disco- 
vered in France by the ingenious Mr. Reaumur, who, by a number of 
experiments, reduced the art to fixed principles. He found that the 
heat necessary for this purpose is nearly the same with that marked 
thirty-two on his barometer, or ninety-six on Fahrenheit’s. This 
degree of heat is nearly that of the skin of a hen^ and all other domes* 
