or, as other learned men have supposed, an immense cavern of water, ' 
Drove them before him thunder-struck, pursu’d 
With terrors and with furies to the bounds 
And crystal wall of heav’n; which op’ning wide. 
Roll’d inward, and a spacious gap disclos’d 
Into the wasteful deep: the monstrous sight 
Struck them with horror backward, but far worse 
Urg’d them behind; headlong themselves they threw 
Down from the verge of heav’n; and dreadful wrath 
Burnt after them to the bottomless pit. 
Hell heard th’ unsufferable noise, Hell saw 
Heav’n ruining from Heav’n, and would have fled 
Affrighted; but strict fate had cast too deep 
Her dark foundations, and too fast had bound. 
Nine days they fell; confounded Chaos roar’d, 
And felt tenfold confusion in their fall 
Through his wild anarchy, so huge a rout 
Incumber’d him with ruin: Hell at last 
Yawning receiv’d them whole, and on them clos’d; 
Hell, their fit habitation, fraught with fire 
Unquenchable, the house of woe and pain. 
Disburden’d Heav’n rejoic’d, and soon repair’d 
Her mural breach, returning whence it roll’d. 
* Milton represents the centre as a chaos, 
Before their eyes in sudden view appear 
The secrets of the centre, a deep and dark 
Illimitable ocean, without bound, 
Without dimension, whose length, breadth, and height, 
And time, and place, are lost; where eldest Night 
And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold 
Eternal anarchy, amidst the noise 
Gf endless wars, and by confusion stand. 
But Descartes, and others, have supposed this centre to be a hollow filled with water. Some 
have in this way interpreted the words of Moses, who, speaking of the deluge, mentions ‘ that 
God broke up the fountains of the great deep.’ In the history of every kingdom of the world, 
there are found traditions of this extensive or universal deluge, and Whiston has supposed it to 
have arisen from a comet, which was conceived to be the sun in those distant days, which 
was supposed to have wandered from its course, and hence the story of Deucalion and Pyrrha, and 
of Phaeton. This fiery meteor, or comet, proceeding from pole to pole, melted the ice which 
occupies or caps the two hemispheres, and thus produced this universal deluge. We should, how¬ 
ever, first remark, that the effusion of but part of the ices of the Cordeliers, in Peru, is sufficient to 
produce an annual overflow of the Amazons, of the Oroonoko, and of several other great rivers or the 
new world, and to inundate a considerable part of the Brazils, of Guiana, and the terra firma of 
America; and that in like manner the melting of part of the snows on the mountains of the Moon in. 
Africa, occasions every year the inundations of Senegal, the overflowing of the Nile, and that similar 
effects are annually produced in a considerable part of southern Asia, in the kingdoms of Bengal, Siam, 
Pegou, Cochin-China, and in the districts watered by the 1 ignis, Euphrates, and many other rivers 
of Asia, which have their sources in chains of mountains perpetually covered with ice, namely, Taurus 
and Imaus. Who then can doubt, but that the total fusion of the ices of the poles, would be suffi¬ 
cient to inundate the whole globe, without having recourse to the hollow of the eaith, being leplete 
with waters ? Only paint to yourself this catastrophe, if the mind can stretch to the conception, 
