It is not the proprietor of land, but the cultivator of the soil, who enjoys the immediate advantage from the diminution of the value of money; and, in proportion to the length of the lease, the former has the benefit. Suppose a farm of five hundred acres is let for ten years, at the rate of five hundred pounds; and that in the course of five years of the lease, the money has diminished in value one half; that is to say, that the farmer would still pay to his landlord only five hundred pounds, but his profits in money would enable him to pay seven hundred and fifty pounds.

This would be an extra profit to him of two hundred and fifty pounds annually, beyond what he could have expected when he took the lease. The conse quence of this is clear; for, if the lease were then to expire, the landlord would naturally exact seven hundred and fifty pounds for the same land, for which he only received five hundred pounds for the five preceding years. On the ori ginal supposition, there remains still five years of the lease to expire. Then let the taxes be encreased, so as to diminish the Value of money in the same proportion, that is, one half more; then the farmer's profit would extend, in the ten years, to five hundred pounds annually beyond what he could have expected when he took the lease. He still pays only five hundred pounds for the farm in the last year of his lease; but the profit, and consequently the rent, is now equal to one thousand pounds. This becomes clear to all those inclined to farm land; and one thousand pounds is offered, per. haps by the same person, or by another farmer, for the very same farm which ten years before was let for five hundred pounds.

This soon enables the proprietors of lands, and the cultivators immediately, to live and be as expensive after as before the imposition of any taxes. The more immediate, or the more distant, profit of the landlord, depends upon the length of his leases; but the final result is plain, and, upon the whole, the operation is uniform and certain.

portance to the health of our youth, surely the hint should be carried into execution by respectful petitions to Par liament from parents and schoolmasters, The passage is at pp. 75, 76, 77, and 78, of the work referred to. The conclusion is in the following words:-" Mr. Pitt, when the treble assessinents were first laid, which were forerunners to the income and property taxes, did exempt those schools from the addition, at which ten pupils were, bond fide, received. The thought ought to have been pursued. A total exemption from this tax (the window tax) ought to take place, that our crowded seminaries may have the advantage of a complete ventilation. Parents, and guardians, and children, and masters, are all concerned in this ques tion, and their united efforts would, prebably, effect the point. It deserves serious attention, and, it is hoped, will soon obtain it."

The affair should be taken up by the respectable society of schoolmasters, and, as delay would serve to prolong the evil complained of, it may be thought deserving of their considera. tion at their next meeting. The pa rents of their numerous pupils would probably be zealous to patronise ther application, and sign with them a petition or petitions to the legislature. It is reasonable to expect that such an application, so supported, and embracing an object of such consequence, would be successful. Such honorable assemblies as the two Houses of Parliament would, as patrons of learning, and protectors of the rising generation,` be forward to shew their attention to the interests of both, and be glad to avail themselves of an opportunity to manifest so liberal a disposition. It is not to be expected that they will volunteer their interference without a complaint, or remedy the evil without an application, to thenr. If I should be so happy as to stimulate the parties concerned to earnest exertion, no further reward will be sought by, ZENO.

For the Monthly Magazine. REFLECTIONS on the ORIGIN OF HISTORY, OR the chief information respecting

Fune state of Egypt at this remote period,

the

derivable from profane writers, we are indebted to Herodotus, justly styled “the Father of History," who flourished in Greece about 400 years before the Christian era. This ceicbrated writer travelled into Egypt for the purpose of making in◄

quiries

quiries and observations. His personal veracity is unimpeached, his diligence of investigation highly laudable, his knowledge extensive, his style flowing and clear; but he is too prone to credulity, and too fond of the marvellous, to be trusted as a safe and certain guide.

Diodorus Siculus, in the age of Augustus, composed in forty books a work of astonishing labour and perseverance, occupying, as it is said, no less than thirty years of his life; this was a General Ilistory of the World. No more than fifteen books remain, of which five treat of the history of the Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, &c. prior the Trojan war. His narrative of these times is acknow. ledged by himself to be blended with fable, and the slender portion of truth con tained in it is with great difficulty separable from the surrounding mass of falsehood; so that his authority, unsupported by collateral and corroborative evidence, cannot be too little relied upon. It is but justice nevertheless to add, that the later periods treated of by this writer have established his character as an able and faithful historian, of whose great work even the fragments are inestimable.

Some hints towards the illustration of the history of the early ages may be found in the literary labours of Plutarch, a native of Charonea, who flourished in the reign of Nero, and whose Lives of Illustri ous Men is one of the most valuable productions of antiquity. Justin, supposed to have lived in the time of the Antonines, was the author of a much esteemed historical work, extending from the reign of Ninus to that of Augustus, and which is said to have been an abridgment of the History of a much older writer, viz. Trogus Pompeius; and this circumstance gives additional weight and value to his narrative.

questioned; Manetho merely reports the forgeries, or extravagant exaggerations, of the Egyptian priests; and what has reached us of the work of Berosus is ob scure, mutilated, and trifling.

Herodotus, an authority highly and truly respectable, positively affirms that Menes, according to the information imparted to him by the Egyptian priests, was, after the race of gods and demigods, the first king of Egypt. The question then arises, who was Menes, and in what age of the world did he reign? The learned chronologers Marsham and Shuckford suppose him to be the same person with Mizraim, the son of Ham, and grandson of Noah; but Sir Isaac Newton and others have shewn the vanity of this hypothesis. "In the reign of Menes," Herodotus says, "the whole of Egypt, except the province of Thebes, was one extended marsh.” And, from the physical phænomena actually existing, it appears, probable that the Delta, with the greater part of Lower Egypt, must have been at that period under wa ter. To Menes, Herodotus ascribes the building of the city of Memphis. He also distinguished himself by confining the channel of the Nile; by digging ca nals, and a lake to carry off the superfluous waters; and by the erection of a magnificent temple to the honour of Vulcan. Now, it is, by almost general consent, allowed that Pathros or Thebes was far more ancient than Memphis, and Diodorus even says, “ that the rise of Memphis was the downfall of Thebes;" so that Mizraim, the supposed founder of the Egyptian nation, cannot by any effort of learning or ingenuity be identified with Menes, the acknowledged founder of Memphis.

66

fants.

Having established their dominion, these savage conquerors governed Egypt under the name of "Shepherd Kings," for the space of almost three centuries. Sir Isaac Newton conjectures that the Canaanite nations, vanquished and expelled by the Israelites, might be the shepherd invaders of that kingdom. But Sir John Marsham computes that the shepherd invasion took place 157 years before the departure of the Israel ites from Egypt. And Dr. Priestley con curs with Bishop Cumberland in supposing, from the remarkable expression, every shepherd is an abomination to the Egyptians" that not only the invasion of the shepherd race, but their final expulsion, were events much more ancient than the date assigned, even by the hypothesis of Marsham; and that the detesta tion in which the occupation of a shepherd was held, arose from the oppression endured by the Egyptians under the bar barous domination of these Scythians, or shepherd kings.

This odious and savage race of monarchs is said to have been subdued and expelled by a sovereign of Upper Egypt, named Amosis: many generations after whom, Busiris, infamous for cruelty, became, as we are told, Kingof Egypt, and he is styled Founder of the City of Thebes. But Thebes was much older than Memphis, and Memphis was founded by Menes, who was much older than Busiris! Amid such confusion and conflict of speculation and assertion, who will pronounce with confidence what is truth? or undertake to unfold the Gordian knots of this dark and intricate period of an cient history?

Osymandyas, one of the successors of Busiris, reduced the Bactrians with an army of 400,000 foot, and 20,000 horse, Very magnificent edifices were raised during his reign, according to the relation of Diodorus; and a public library, the first we read of in history, was established by him. Over the entrance was placed this apposite inscription, “The medicine of the soul." His expenses were vast, but his revenues were fully adequate to them; the annual produce of his mines of gold and silver alone being, at the lowest estimation, computed at twenty millions sterling.

A distant descendant of Osymandyas, named Uchoreus, according to Diodorus, built Memphis, which, if Herodotus and the Egyptian priests are to be believed, had been founded many ages before by Menes. Nitocris, an Ethiopian woman,

next filled the throne of Uchorens, her brother, whom the Egyptians had murdered, and whose death she artfully revenged upon those who had deposed trim, and transferred the kingdom to her. For, inviting the principal conspirators to a festival in a subterraneous apartment, she contrived to fill it suddenly with water, in which they were left to perish. This princess is said, by Diodorus, to have built the three great pyramids, but this ho nour is disputed or divided by Cheops.

Twelve generations afterwards, Maris, mentioned as the three-hundred-and-thirtieth monarch in succession from Menes, swayed the sceptre of Egypt. Moris was, conformably to the account of Herodotus, the former of the immense lake intended for the reception of the superfluous waters of the Nile, and yet known by his name. This Prince is said to have been the immediate predecessor of the celebrated Sesostris. But here a new scene of perplexity opens When did this mighty king and conqueror flourish? And with whom was he contemporary? Josephus is of opinion, that Sesostris was the same person with Sesac, or Shishak, the Egyptian monarch, who, in the reign of Rehoboam, invaded Judea with an im mense army, and took and plundered Jerusalem. In this hypothesis, Sir John Marsham, Sir Isaac Newton, and Bossuet, concur.

But the learned Perizo nius, in his elaborate work, “Origines Egyptiaca et Babylonicæ," affirms, with more appearance of reason, that Sesostris and Sesac were persons widely different, and that the former reigned many years before the latter.

"Ac

Mr. Whiston takes Sesostris to be "the very Pharaoh who was drowned in the Red Sea." Archbishop Usher thinks that he was the son of Amenophis, who, agreeably to some accounts, succeeded Moris,. and that Amenophis was the Pharoah of Moses. Herodotus, Diodorus, and Strabo, make Sesostris much older than the Trojan war: and Justin says, that he lived before the days of Ninus, the founder of Nineveh. cording to the priests," says the venerable father of history, Sesostris was the first who, passing the Arabian gulphi in a fleet of long vessels, reduced under his dominion the inhabitants bordering on the Erythrean sea. On his return to Egypt, as I learned from the same authority, he levied a mighty army, and made a mar. tial progress by land, subduing all the nations whom he met with on his march. Continuing his progress, he passed over

from

from Asia to Europe, and subdued the countries of Scythia and Thrace. The greater part of the pillars which Sesostris erected in the places which he conquered, are no longer to be found; some of them, I myself have seen in Palestine. The same priests informed me, that Sesostris returned to Egypt with an immense number of captives, of the different nations which he had vanquished, and whom he employed in making those vast and numerous canals, by which Egypt is intersected; and other public works. Except Sesostris, no monarch of Egypt was ever master of Ethiopia."

To this extraordinary account, Dio. dorus adds many other particulars yet more stupendous. During his father's life-time, he invaded Libya, and carried his arms as far west as the Atlantic ocean. On coming to the crown, he formed an army of 600,000 foot, 24,000 horse, and 27,000 chariots, with which he conquered Ethiopia. With a fleet of four hundred tall ships in the Arabian gulph, he sailed into the Persian and Indian seas, and subdued all the nations on those coasts. With his army, he crossed the Ganges, on the banks of which river he erected pillars. At the same time, with his fleet in the Mediterranean, he subdued the sea-coast of Phoenicia, and the neighbouring islands. After all these exploits, he reposed in peace, enjoying his unrivalled greatness. In every considerable city he erected a magnificent temple, with this inscription, "No Egyptian has laboured in the building of this edifice." To this historic romance is added a cir. cumstance, happily, as incredible as it is detestable, viz. that whenever this famous conqueror went to the public temples, or entered his capital, he caused his chariot to be drawn by the Princes whom he had vanquished."

Such are the accounts remaining of the great Sesostris, respecting whom the Abbé Millot has, with much good sense, remarked, "Tout ce qu'il me semble pouvoir assurer, c'est que les Egyptiens ont cu un Sesostris; que ce Prince fit des choses memorables; qu'il fut conquerunt et legislateur; mais que sur l'entendue de ses conquêtes et les circonstances de sa vie it n'y a guerre que des fables contradictoires." The eloquent, but credulous, Bossuet, on the other hand, seems disposed to yield implicit credit to all the wonders told of this monarch, and he copies the narra. tives of Herodotus and Diodoras, as genuine history. The chronology only of the Egyptians, he admits to have been

inaccurate. Egypt herself," says this prelate, discovered great uncertainty as to the most illustrious periods of her monarchy. And, from the antiquity ascribed to Osiris, it is evident that they confounded his times with that of the commencement of the Universe."

With such doubtful steps must we be content to traverse the earliest periods of history. For Egypt is confessedly the country of which more is recorded than any other during the remotest ages of which any memorial is preserved. And the astonishing remains of ancient greatness yet existing in that kingdom, with their indefinable origin, and the celebrity of its former race of inhabitants for knowledge, wisdom, and all the arts of civilisation, fill the mind with a sublime kind of melancholy. But the night of history now approaches to its close; and the faint rays of twilight begin to dawn on the vast, trackless, and almost inter minable, waste.

To the Editor of the Monthly Magazine.

SIR,

M

(Continued from our last.)

R. FAREY says, in the same page 515, still against Common Scuse, "The difficulty of reconciling facts with arthodoxy in religious faith, has not, I conceive, its origin in erroneous translations, but in an erroneous physiology and geology; in confounding together the ancient and present organic races, those of which no record remains but in the two first verses of Genesis, with those whose origin is related at length in the subsequent verses of this and the following chapters." This is the same assumption as that which I have pointed out before, where he says: "That all this class of organic bodies was sub-aqueous, or lived in or at the bottom of a deep and original ocean, of which par ticular mention is made by Moses, before any dry land appeared." This idea I shall now examine.

What do we read in these two first verses of Genesis? "First verse: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.---Second verse: And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the water."-Is there any mention of the existence of organic beings? It is long since interpreters have, with reason, considered these verses as а sublime preamble to the history of creatiou. The words, In the beginning God

created

ereated the heaven and the earth, comprise the whole creation, which the following days divide into six periods. The author continues thus, in his surmises on the causes of opinions different from his own: "Or, still more, in the ignorance or pious frauds of those who would, from this confounding of different races of beings, and a total inisrepresen tation of the facts of the terrestrial dislocations and their probable periods of existence, draw arguments to prove the occurrence of the deluge in the days of Noah; which, according to this false philosophy, new modelled the terrestrial strata, and entombed in them the or ganic beings, of the previous surface, and waters; notwithstanding that Moses, our only authority, represents this event as a miraculous and quiet effusion of the water on the land, for the express purpose of drowning sinful men. The deluge, like the fall of man, are known only through a revelation to Moses, and must be received as articles of faith, and seem incapable of natural proof, I think; whatever persons, with more zeal than knowledge, may have maintained to the contrary, to the obvious injury of both religion and science." The religious motive of this remark deserves all my attention; and, as it conciliates to Mr. Farey all y regard, I will undertake to prove to him, that, though his animadversion be applicable to some commentators on Genesis by geology, who had wrote before they were sufficiently in formed in that science, I have not given occasion to be placed in their number.

....

We differ on an essential point, as he considers in the same light the fall of man and the deluge: the former could certainly not, any more than the creation, be known to Moses, but by revelation. But it is not the same of the deJuge, which was transmitted to all the descendants of Noah and his family. Moses was only directed by revelation in what concerns the time of the event, and its motive. He relates, that God revealed himself to Noah, to make him consider the depravity of the actual generation as His motive for producing the deluge, in order to destroy them, and the earth with them (for such is the expression of the Hebrew original); and that He ordered him to construct the ath, for the preservation of himself and his family; and also for that of the races of such animals as he would want when he should come out of the ark. After which Moses describes the events; and,

with this description, a true knowledge of geology exactly agrees.

I wish Mr. Farey had read my (already mentioned) Letters to Professor Blumenbach, in the British Critic, especially the VIth., contained in the Numbers for February and March, 1795, and re printed at the end of my Elementary Treatise; for then he could not place me in the number of those," who, by ignorance or pious fraud, had been led to draw arguments to prove the occur. rence of the deluge in the days of Noah.' For, after having pointed out the cause of error in that class of geologists, I said, that their error, which furnished a clue to unbelievers against the Mosaic account of the deluge, proceeded from their having abandoned the literal sense of Genesis: then, resuming that sense, I proved, step after step, that it was abso lutely confirmed by the geological pha nomena which I had detailed in the preceding letters. I wish Mr. Farey would take the pains to read all these letters, as he would then know what precise points of my system he thinks he can oppose by facts.

In the course of the same letter, I have not only admitted, but proved, that Moses wrote, even the history of the De luge, by inspiration of the Supreme Being: for he contradicted the common opinion of his own and other nations respecting the time of that event, which they placed at an enormous distance. However, all the nations of the East had received, from the successors of Noah the tradition of that event, with many of its real cir cumstances; but they had disfigured them in their Mythologies. Mr. Bryant, and Mr. Maurice (in his History of Hin. dostan), have shown, however, many traits of these mythologies which agree with Genesis; and, besides, they have pointed out in the former, some circumstances which have not been expressed by Moses, though proved to be real by geology. This is not surprising, for Moses related only the principal events concerning the descendants of Noah.

I have treated also fully in the same letters of another point, concerning a part of my system to be examined, namely, that our continents are not the same which were inhabited by the Antedilu vians; that the former continents had sunk, which had been the cause of the deluge; and that the present continents were before the bed of the sea. This fact is so evident, that it has been admited by most geologists, who differ

only