P.S. As for Pegasus, I must particularly protest in his behalf. He can have a certificate of good behaviour from one most respectable gentleman, and nine most accomplished ladies. And in ancient days it is not upon record that he ever threw more than one person, and he had no business to mount him. He may have thrown many in modern days for the same reason; but from Petrarch, Dante, Ariosto, and Tasso, to Racine, Corneille, Voltaire, Shakespeare, Otway, Dryden, Milton, Akenside, Gray, and Thomson, and several now living, he has always been very manageable-to those who deserved to sit him. Ladies have experienced this, Miss Seward, Mrs. Charlotte Smith, and others, who are in Elysium, and several who still make an Elysium here, whom I should be very happy to call as witnesses. That he belongs to the class of Beautiful Animals cannot be disputed. How useful he has been, let the annals of poetry rehearse! I trust he will continue to adorn the celestial plains. If, however, any hardy adventurer will persist in an attempt to turn him out from that most ample pasture, what damages may be recovered, or what censure or punishment ineurred, in the court of Parnassus, I will not suddenly pronounce. This I know, he enjoys immortal youth, and thirty centuries have taken nothing from his spirit and activity. And, all good nature as he is, it may be of use to those who would compel him to self-defence to remember, that Mount Helicon bears adamantine testimony to the force of his hoof. "Recalcitrat undique tutus," will, I hope, always be his motto.

by this question: Why has the earth any mountains? I never deviated from that question, which I treated in five letters, from the dictates only of natural history and natural philosophy. This may also be seen in the opening of the sixth letter, where I then positively declared that I intended to prove the conformity of the monuments of the earth with the first chapters of Genesis, including the account of the deluge and its

consequences.

If all that I have adduced to prove the birth of our continents to have been a sudden revolution on our globe, during which the ancient continents sinking down formed the present bed of the sea, be well founded, there must have been a violent motion of the waters. Now, this circumstance is impressed in all the mythologies of the eastern nations. In the same letter to Professor Blumenbach, after having quoted my authori in the following manner. ties on this subject, I stated the result "Not only the family of Noah was struck with this event, in the manner I have shown, they must have been as spectators; but they knew, and transmitted to their posterity, that God had interposed on this occasion, and that it was by his power they had been preserved. We know this from the ancient mythologies, the first foundations of which necessarily refer to traditions of Noah's family. Now, the nations of the earth have applied the whole strength of their imaginations to describe the terrible agitation of the sea during the deluge: or, rather, it is from

I

SIR,

(Continued from our last.) COME to the part of Mr. FAREY'S idea, that the deluge was a quiet effusion of water on the land. This certainly was the case with respect to the rain of forty days; but Moses says also, that the fountains of the deep were broken up; and, in the language of Genesis, the deep means the sea. Moses therefore, in his short account of the deluge, mentions its two causes. When Mr. Farey shall have leisure to read, in the British Critic, my Letters to Professor Blumenbach, he will certainly acquit me of what he attributes to some geoJogists, a pious fraud; for, in the first of these letters, I positively set aside the considerations which might be drawn from the expressions of Genesis, and declared that I considered geology only as a natural science. I therefore Legan

among them, on which they exerted all the power of their fancy when left to themselves, that proceeds the strong character observed in the oriental images. And they had not lost sight of the cir cumstance of a superior power presiding in this catastrophe; for they particularly attribute to such a Being the preservation of a bark, notwithstanding the violent agitation of the ocean; which bark contained some holy personage with his family, consisting of seven people."

Thus the history of the deluge, as I have stated before, is very different from that of the fall of man: the latter, with the important circumstance of the origin of the human race and the events relating to the first men, could not be known but by Revelation; while the deluge happened at an advanced period of the history of mankind. The event was surely miraculous, and it was predicted, because the omnipotent Being directs,

to

to his own wise purposes, the means he has established himself; but it was operated by the physical causes described in Genesis, and their effects could not but leave strong traces on the earth, and as strong recollections among the descendants of Noah; and both are to be our guides.

So far, I have taken to myself Mr. Farey's ideas, though not directly opposed to me; for, till this place, he had only mentioned Common Sense; but, when he speaks of me, he first points out a mistake of mine, in the following passage: "Mr. De Luc seems to err, in supposing that Common Sense referred only to Mr. Parkinson's Paper on the Strata round Londou; when, indeed, he had not alluded to this, but expressly to his general work, on Organic Remains in all Parts of the World, in three quarto voluines; a work which it astonishes me that the veteran geologist should appear unacquainted with."

This, sir, is a mistake which you had already pointed out yourself in your Number for June, by a note, p. 412, on my paper relating to Common Sense's system, and which I found to be just. But this mistake has had no influence in my remarks on that system; and the cause of it was, that at that time I had recently received, by Mr. Parkinson's kindness, his paper containing observations on some strata in the neighbourhood of London, and on the fossil remains contained in them. This therefore was only present to my memory. I know that his large work is a most vaJuable collection of organic remains in the strata of various countries; but I know also, that, in consequence of these remains not being found in the undermost strata called primary, he has concluded (as I had done) that they did not exist during the formation of these strata; that their different classes began successively to exist during the formation of the secondary strata, which required a long time. Hence, recurring to the first chapter of Genesis, Mr. Parkinson has also concluded from its context, that the word day is not to be understood as signifying a day of twenty-four hours, but a period of undetermined length: following then the succession of different strata and of the organic bodies which they contained, he has described the operations in each of these successive periods, agreeably to the words of the text, and nearly in the same manner as I have done in my let ters to Professor Blumenbach, which he does not appear to have known, but

only my first work, Lettres sur l'Histoire de la Terre & de l'Homme. Lastly, (and this is a most essential coincidence to my present purpose,) he mentions the same symptoms of great catastrophes, by fractures and dislocations of the strata during these periods. It is a great satisfaction for me, to see these conformities between us, proceeding from our common study of the organic remains in the succession of the secondary strata, while there are none in the primary.

The next article of Mr. Farey's paper will lead to many important objects; for which reason I shall first copy the whole. "At page 414, Mr. De Luc mentions having proved in his works that coal-beds are submerged peat mosses and of dry-land origin; yet this is a position from which I must entirely dissent, after having examined large tracts of carboniferous strata (far more extensive than those scattered patches mentioned by Mr. Williams) with no ordinary care and attention; and assert, that nothing can be more unlike the recent vegetables of peat mosses, than those extinct ones preserved in coal-strata, as Mr. Parkinson's numerous plates and collections, those of Mr. Sowerby, and numerous others, in this and in every other country where geology has been cultivated, will testify. Bog plants, though always saturated with moisture, do not, as is well known, grow under water; and yet, no person can examine the impressions of large plants that abound in coal strata, without being satisfied that they had a subaqueous growth; since hollow tubes of vegetable matter, little thicker than paper, of two to eight or ten, or even twenty or thirty inches in diameter, and many feet high, could not have supported themselves in the air, however sheltered the situation, or even in water that was not very deep and quiescent.

"Those who have doubt on the subject should cxamine the remarkable grit. stone quarry, called Birchwood, in York. shire, and the gardens of Sir Edward Smith, where two of these vegetable pipes, in a coaly state, filled with perfect grit stone of the quarry, are erected as pillars at the entrance of a grotto; the largest of which is elliptical, thirty by twenty-two inches in diameter, and was twelve feet high, standing erect, in the quarry above-mentioned, which rests on a coal-seam that has been on fire." I

shall successively indicate my remarks on the whole of this passage.

The first error of Mr. Farey that I shall point out, is his idea that the bog 3 $2

plants,

plants, of which peat is formed, though always saturated with moisture, do not grow in water. If he had read my Geological Travels, on some parts of the Coasts of the Baltic, and of the North Sea, published in London in the year 1810, he would have seen what labour and attention I had bestowed on peatmosses, and thus have conceived a very different idea of the growth of these plants.

The principal mass of the peat is certainly formed of sub-aqueous plants, and their first bed under water is the conferva, filling the water with its green clouds; in which they grow, and copiously prosper; first, all the aquatic mosses, especially the sphagnum palus. tre, very remarkable by its star-like tufts along a thin thread; then many kinds of reeds and other sub-aquatic plants, which were shown and named to me by the Prof. of Botany of Rostock, (p. 146) not only in the moss itself, but in the peat dug many feet deep; they are, scirpus caspitosus, scorpus maritimus, scirpus pauciflorus, eriophorum vaginatum, equisetum palustre, equisetum fluviatile. I followed very attentively the progress of mosses, along lakes and rivers, sometimes with danger, as it is related in my Travels, by proceeding from the part of the moss already solid, and even culti vated, to those parts where the sort of mattress formed by mere aquatic plants, still in water, yielded to the weight of my body; however, when these aquatic plants are thus matted, various terrestrial plants begin to grow on that soil, which

is enriched by a brown powder, produced

from the molecule of the vegetables, separated without putrefaction, or the loss of their combustit te faculty, which is the characteristic of peat; and, as I have proved in these Travels, is owing to some antiseptic quality of moss water.

It is not surprising that the vegetables found in the strata that cover coal-beds are different from those which form the now-existing peat-mosses, since we find so many differences between the fossil and recent organic bodies of other kinds: but there are in the former many of the now existing vegetables, among which are various species of ferns: and I may give an instance of a mere aquatic plant, namely, the sphagnum palustre. In our collection at Geneva we have a number of specimens of the state which forms the roof of the coal-beds in Forest, a county of France, on which is impressed that plant, which is absolutely sub-aqueous,

and only shoots up above water some straggling branches, which continue to grow on the surface of the moss; these have left their impression in the stratum of slate, formed after the submersion of the island on which the moss had existed.

I am acquainted with the astonishing vegetable described by Mr. Farey, having seen it near Colebrook Dale. These large, hollow, and thin tubes, branching like reeds, appeared to belong to the stratum above the coals; in some parts also the substance of the plant is converted into coal, which agrees with my system of coals being a mineralization of vegetable substances. But what can be said of the manner in which that nowunknown vegetable may have grown, when we see it, not only imbedded in, but filled with, grit-stone? What we can judge is only, that, after the submersion of the peat-moss, to which it belonged, a new precipitation happened in the aucient sea, of a sand fit to consolidate, with time, into grit. Such were at first all our stoney strata, when organic fossils were imbedded in them, and this stratum in particular was of a nature to consolidate into grit, both in these kind of reeds and in the whole of the strata inclosing them: but they afterwards underwent disruptions, for it was in a cleft that I saw these enormous tubes at Colebrook Dale. J. A. DE LUC.

Windsor.

To the Editor of the Monthly Magazine.

SIR,

Peters' Dying Father's last Legacy

SEND you the conclusion of Hugh

to an only Child.-Some of your readers may be pleased with the knowledge of such other of his writings as I am acquainted with.

In 1646 he published, “ God's Doings and Man's Duty, a Sermon preached be fore both Houses of Parliament, the Lord Mayor, and Aldermen of London," &c. and, in the same year, “Mr. Peters's last Report of the English Wars, occasioned by the importunity of a friend pressing an answer for some queries," &c. In 1647 he published a 4to. pamplet of fourteen pages, entitled, " A Word for the Army, and Two Words to the Kingdom, to clear the one and cure the other, forced in much plainness and brevity from their faithful humble servant, Hugh Peters." This tract is reprinted in the Harleian Miscellany. In 1651, an answer was published to Mr. Hugh Peters's "Good

Work

Work for a good Magistrate, or a short Cut to great quiet." This tract of his I have not yet met with.

A small volume of tales and jests was printed soon after his death, and attributed to him. In 1807, Mr. Caulfield, a bookseller of London, reprinted this book, and at the end of the Preface mentions the following circumstance: "The publisher of this edition, having in the year 1791 put forth an account of several remarkable persons,' had an application made to him for a portrait of Peters, occurring in the book, by a reverend-looking divine, in appearance upwards of 80 years of age, who reported himself his grandson, stating, that, on the execution of his ancestor, his mother, the daughter to whom Hugh Peters addressed his dying legacy, had withdrawn herself to America to her mother's relations, that she married and settled in that country, and that he was the youngest of her children. He was a fine looking man, nearly six feet in height, and seemed rather proud than ashamed of his grandfather." If a any of your readers can furnish me, by the post, with further information respecting his family, or will communicate any other particulars relative to him than are collected in his Life by James Harris, they would peculiarly oblige, Clifton, near Bristol, November, 1812.

WM. TYSON.

Hugh Peters's last Legacy to his Daughter. (Concluded from vol. 32, p. 462.) I thought Ireland the clearest work, and had the pay of a preacher then and afterward, as I could get it; I was not here at Edge-hill, nor the Bishop of Canterburies troubles or death. Upon my return, was staid again from going home, by the Earl of Warwick, my patron; then by the Earl of Essex, afterwards by the Parliament, who at last gave me an estate, now taken away, I had success to the king about my New-England business: he used me civilly: I, in requital, offered my poor thoughts three times for his safety: I never had hand in contriving or acting his death, as I am scandalized, but the contrary (to my mean power); I was never in any councils or cabal at any time; I hated it, and had no stowage for counsel, thinking all governments should lye open to all : nor bad penny from any general, but lived in debt, as now I ain; nor had means for any expences: what I had others shared in. I confess I did what I did strenu ously, though with a weak head, being

overlaid with my own and others' troubles; never was angry with any of the king's party, nor any of them for being so; thought the Parliament authority lawfull, and never studied it much; have not had my hand in any man's blood, but saved many in life and estate. The Parliament, in 1644, gave me the bishop's books, valued at 1401, which I intended for New England, being a part of his pri vate library, which (with all my own) I have often offered for 1501. the mistake about them was and is great, for they never were so considerable; and these were my gettings, who never aimed to be rich, nor ever had means to reach it. The changes grew (as you see) a commonwealth I found, but thus altered; I staid so long at Whitehall, contented with any good government that would keep things together, till the breach of that they call Richard's Parliament, and then I removed, and never returned more, but fell sick long, and in trouble ever since; never was summoned but once by the council, which was in April, about books; of which (lying sick) I craved of the president of the council to excuse me, who sent unto me he had, and I gave him an account of the books; but, hearing that my estate was gone, and I indebted, was private, and did purpose so to live, and so to dye, having a resolution (which I kept) never to meddle with state-matters, but, either here or in New England, to spend my old age in looking into my grave and eternity; and never had to do with any transactions with souldiers or others; nor never would, had I a longer te, my head and heart be tired, as well as my body craz'd. I thought the Act of Indemnity would have included me, but the hard character upon me excluded me, which I was sensible of, that nature (in its own preservation) carried me to privacy; but free from that report of the manner which is suggested, of which you may be assured, by my zeal (it seems) [ have exposed myself to all manner of reproach; but wish you to know, that (besides your mother) I have had no fellowship (that way) with any woman since first I knew her, having a godly wife before also, I bless God.

But, because what is before written may seem my white side only, I shall deal in all plainness with you, that, though for religion, I am and have been really sound and orthodox to my best apprehension, according to the blessed word of God, and the generality of the Protestant confessions; yea, though I travelled

through

through Protestant churches for order, to espy the best, and have joyned with the churches of Christ, and took in with that I call a tender Presbytery, for such was ours in New England, and yet so, as I never unchurcht any parish where a godly minister was, and godly people joyned together, though not all so; and do know God may have a people under all forms, and would withdraw to the farthest Indges, rather than give offence to what I cannot close with; yet, so unworthy have my thoughts been of myself to be a meet preacher of the gospel, that more than twice I had given it over, had not friends prevailed, yea, my profession of the gospel hath been with much folly, weakness, and vanity; I crave pardon of any that have taken offence, though in a christian way I have not had the reproofs of three, either for preaching or conversation. I am heartily sorry I was popular, and known better to others than myself; it hath much lain to my heart above any thing almost, that I left that people I was engaged to in New England; it cuts deeply, I look upon it as a root evil; and, though I was never parson nor vicar, never took ecclesiastical promotion, never preached upon any agree. ment for money in my life, though not without offers, and great ones, yet had a flock, I say I had a flock, to whom I was ordained, who were worthy of my life and Jabours, but I could never think myself fit to be their pastor, so unaccomplished for such a work, for which who is sufficient (cryes the apostle)? This is my sore trouble, and a private life would have become me best, and my poor gift have had its vent also; but here I was overpowered to stay. For errors in judgment I have pittyed, never closed with any that know; when I was a tryer of others I went to hear and gain experience, rather than to judge; when I was called about mending laws, I rather was there to pray than riend laws; when to judge in wills, I only went sometimes to learn and help the poor than to judge; but in all these I confess I might well have been spared.

Nor do I take pleasure in remembring any my least activity in state-matters, though this I can say, I no-where minded who ruled, fewer or more, so the good ends of government be given out, in which men may live in godliness and honesty. I have often said, that is a good government where men may be as good as they can, not so bad as they would, where good men and things are upper

most; and have thought, if good magis trates cannot bring all to their judgment, the dissenters may have liberty, being kept out of office, and want some other public characters. That which a friend of mine and myself writ by letters about magistrates was very little, and the Records of the Tower were only named as giving way to all other records, to cut off dissentions, or marks of tyranny, which no good prince will exercise; I am sorry if any offended, it was zeal for quietness. I honour laws and good lawyers heartily, and know their use, only ease, expedi tion, and cheapness, what good man doth not call for. Sedition is the heating men's minds against the present authority, in that I never was, yet sorry authority should have any hard thoughts of me, or know so inconsiderable a creature as myself; I never could be fit for a court, many ways not fit, and am therefore grieved that I was either constrained or content to live where I could do so little good, for I would dye without a secret in my bosom, unless cases of conscience in the way of preaching, which are secret indeed, and for reading them to the world I had appointed a portion, if it had been continued to me.

Upon all this you may ask what design I drove, being looked upon that way? Truly these three:

First, That goodness, that which is really so, and such religion, might be highly advanced.

Secondly, That good learning might have all countenance.

Thirdly, That there may not be a beggar in Israel, in England.

And for all these I have projected or laboured, and I have no other. And these I pray his present Majesty may look to, and that God would bless him every way.

If in the prosecution of these I have used any of my wonted rudeness, or unguided zcal, I am heartily sorry. So, begging pardon from God and man, con stitution or custom, I conclude in these particulars, though the aim be good.

I conclude the former thus: I think, that, as bad men care not who rule, or what is uppermost, so they may have their lusts; so good men, if they may en joy God and his truth with good consci ence. For my whole course you know and feel where my wound hath been these twenty years, which hath occasi oned not only my head and heart break. ing, but travelling from mine own nest into business.

Bless