but being of a liberal way of thinking, she condescended to extend her favours to all those who chose to pay a very handsome price for them. I blushed for the depravity of human nature, when I recollected how admirably this girl had worn the mask of innocence. || || calculated to promote the cause of general utility. But to make use of a vulgar but significant proverb, I found that I had got Out of the frying-pan into the fire; for the lady was so charmed with the reformation which she supposed she had wrought in my sentiments and opinions, that she fraukly offered to live with me as my mistress, purely, as she assured me, for the benefit our example would be to the world; and the very plain negative that I was obliged to give to this proposal, put her philo that the loss of her temper should be followed by that of my politeness, I took my leave while she was in the midst of a torrent of re My fourth epistle came from a lady who described herself as very young, very pretty, and very desirous of marrying for a very particular reason. There was a romantic simplicity in ber letter that struck my fancy not a little, and I lost no time in paying my devoirs to her. I found that she had not exaggerated either her youth or beauty; for she was, in fact, a perfect Hebe. She received me with great modesty and propriety, and I began to fancy that her wish for matrimony arose from a desire to avoid the snares to which the young and beautiful are liable; but I confess I could hardly keep my countenance when I found out my mistake. My third letter came from a lady who signed herself Rationalia; it contained a long account of the writer's sentiments and opinions on the subject of matrimony, which was, she declared, of human not of divine origin; and of all human institutions the most senseless and unjust.sophy fairly to flight; and as I did not wish What right (she asked me) could one rational being have to monopolize to himself or herself not only the person but the affections of another? That natural love of variety, and ab-proaches. horrence of restraint, which is implanted in the human mind, must infallibly prevent the success of such an attempt; but as, in the present state of society, we could not indulge ourselves in following the dictates of nature and of reason, she was willing, provided I proved in other respects perfectly agreeable to her taste, to submit to a ceremony which ought to be abjured by every one who would wish to arrive at a state of perfectibility.As it never once seemed to strike this lady that I could have any possible objection to her, I confess that my curiosity was raised to see her, and as she || had given me an address, I waited on her the next day; but I felt no temptation to repeat my visit; for independent of her philosophical opinions, which are the reverse of my own, I neither liked her person nor her manners. The former might have served a statuary as a model for Thalestris, and the latter were equally coarse and dictatorial. She did not seem to have the smallest idea of delicacy, which was, she assured me, a weakness that every rational woman ought to be above feeling. She felt in herself a capacity of increasing the happiness of a fellow being, and she was - certain that I could not converse with her without being sensible of her preferableness to the vain unmeaning triflers on whom I had hitherto bestowed my time and attention.-I could not be so rade as to undeceive her, and I was rather at a loss how to put an end to my visit, when luckily I recollected that it is a maxim in the new school, that we ought always to prefer what appears to ourselves the greater good, without regarding how far our doing so may affect the happiness of others. I therefore gravely told her, that the perusal of her letter had entirely overturned my prejudices || in favour of the marriage state; and that I|| would not be guilty of so much injustice to Bociety as to attempt to monopolize to myself the person and the affections of a woman so The poor girl had been infected with the scribbling mania. She wrote a romance, which has been published, and of which the Reviewers have spoken in high terms; and somebody has persuaded her that if she was fortunate enough to have her works revised and corrected by a man of genius and learning, she would acquire both fame and fortune. She related this to me with the greatest simplicity, and assured me that if I thought myself clever enough to undertake the task of revising her manuscripts, she would marry me with all her heart; but as the office of corrector of the press is not, I believe, a very pleasant one, and as I would much rather see a proof of my wife's affection for me, and attention to my happiness, than of her literary abilities, I told her. that I had a perfect horror of all scholastic pursuits, and that the very sight of a Printer's devil would put me in a fever. This settled the matter at once, and she dismissed me with. out much ceremony. My last visit was to a widow, whose letter informed me that she had found the holy state so agreeable, that she longed to enter it again. This lady was about forty-five; her person, without being handsome, was very pleasing; and her manners convinced me that she had accustomed to genteel life, and might repeat. seen the world. I was very much struck with her, but a piece of information that I have|edly have settled could she have consented to since had, has put all the Cupids to flight. You must know, Mr. Editor, that she has buried four husbands, and as I think that she may literally, not metaphorically, be called a killing charmer, I am firmly resolved that 1 || will not make the fifth. I have received letters both from Scotland and Ireland; but nothing should tempt me to enter into a treaty with a fair one from the latter country. This observation does not proceed from any degree of illiberality, for I am convinced that the ladies of that country are as amiable women as any in the world; but || there is one never failing trait in an Irish woman's temper that would not accord with my plan, and that is the want of medium. Warm and impassioned, they act in general rather from impulse than a sense of duty; while their native haughtiness renders them very tenacions of either a real or a supposed slight. It must indeed be admitted in their favour, that they do as they would be done by, for there is no sacrifice which an Irishwoman is not capable of making for the man of her heart. The Scottish belles are indeed cool and prudent enough to satisfy even the most reasonable man; but as I should not wish to undertake a long journey for the sake of seeing any lady who might not after all approve of me, or whom (pardon, fair readers, my want of gallantry) I might not approve of, I think it is best to decline the negociations which those ladies would have done me the honour to enter into. Out of the number of those ladies who have favoured me with letters, there is but one whose epistle remains unanswered; and as I was much pleased with it, I will transcribe it for you. "Sir, The various disappointments you appear to have met with in your addresses, I should have expected would have induced you to abandon the enterprize altogether; but as you still continue in the wish for a social partner, I think I could introduce to you one whose manners and education perfectly accord with your situation in life. According to your statement in your letter, she is not a Lucinda in youth and beauty; nevertheless, rather prepossessing than otherwise, and twelve years younger than yourself. The great obstacle to her marrying hitherto has been want of fortune (a consideration you seem to despise, which is not generally the case with men of fortune). She has always been || descend to marry an inferior in point of situa- remain your humble servant." * Now, Mr. Editor, the reason I have troubled you with the letter of my fair X. Y. Z, is, that from the disappointments I have met with, I am resolved to treat with such ladies only as may favour me with real names and address. If X. Y. Z. will do this, or appoint an interview, I shall be most happy to treat with, or wait upon her. There is, I confess, a fair correspondent of yours about whom I feel no small share of curiosity, though she has not condescended to take any notice of me; the person I mean is Miss Delia Doleful, whose letter to you was published in your Magazine of February last. I chanced to meet with it the other day, and I should be glad to have her address, if you can give it to me. I should be happy to engage with X. Y. Z. in serving our country in the honourable and forlorn hope of matrimony, but many things fall out between the cup and the lip. I would like to have two strings to my bow, and there is a certain something in the style of Miss Doleful's letter that persuades me I should like the writer of it; but whether she would like me remains to be tried; but I assure X. Y. Z. that I shall not take any steps to discover the fair Delia if I can bring matters to a conclusion with her. Will you, Mr. Editor, allow me the favour you granted in a former instance, of having my letters addressed to your office.—And believe me your obliged servant, LANCELOT LASTHOPE. * As some of our readers may be inclined to think that this epistle is merely apocryphal, we beg leave seriously to assure them, that it is copied verbatim from one now in our possession; only that from motives of delicacy to the writer we have suppressed the address, which was actually sent to Mr. Lasthope.-EDITOR. THOUGHTS ON THE EARTH'S ASSUMING ITS PRESENT FORM AND CONTEXTURE. To the appearance of the high ground called Whitcliff, near the town of Ludlow, in Shropshire, the following ideas owe their existence. These extensive hills chiefly consist of a hard grey sand-stone, abounding with the wreck of fishes: among those of the crustaceous and testaceous kinds, I found lobsters, cockles, razor-shells, barnacles, and oysters; also a number of broken stones, apparently petrified fishes of the finny tribe, are confusedly scattered over the face of the country. From the deposition of these phenomena, I have endeavoured to reason back to the formation of the earth, and have drawn therefrom the subsequent conclusions. First, that this wreck did form parts of fishes of the same kinds as are now found in the sea; were once alive in, and on this ground; and though there never was a greater quantity of water in the globe than at present, yet this hill was immersed in the ocean: consequently the whole island, with all the continents and lands, now above its surface, and the exterior of the world, to use Milton's language, was "sea without shore." The hypothesis of the superficial part of the globe having been all water, I shall endeavour to sustain on the following basis of reasoning. The solid mass of matter we call land, I conceive was once soft, and in consequence smoothly round; in that state the quantity of water now in this planet was sufficient to bury it many fathoms beneath its surface; at which period, the exuviæ above-mentioned, and all such as are found on hills and plains, in different parts of the world, were living animals, the only inhabitants of this globe, and probably continued so for many ages. The conjecture of the globosity and softness of the land will be corroborated when it is considered that the natural figure of all fluid bodies are round; of which the sun, planets, and their satellites, are a proof; although some parts of them appear to be fixed, and project beyond the regular limits of a sphere, still the liquid and soft substances are compelled to restore their rotundity as far as possible, by changing their situation, to obtain the equilibrium: this is exemplified on the globe we inhabit. Now, from the circularity of the heavenly bodies, we may rationally conclude, that all the matter of this world, and perhaps all the planets and suns of the universe, were in a fluid state when they were flung from the hand of the Deity to their proNo. XIX, Vol. III.-N. S. per stations in the different systems, thence their spherical form so I conceive that the solid and rocky part of the globe was the same, and encompassed by the sea. But when this soft substance was sufficiently agitated, or its par ticles blended to a certain degree, by a process beyond the reach of human reason to define, it leaves little room to doubt but a general fixation of the rocky matter took place, and did (as salt made one of its principal constituent parts) in its transmutation, from fluidity to stony firmness, give itself another figure. Thus it contracted in most places now covered by the sea, and pushed itself forward where it appears above its surface; and the water rolling off from the projecting parts, found itself a resting place on the indented sides; and thus again restored the spherical form of the planet, so far as its quantity would allow. That the tract of land which gave rise to these observations was once a bed of sand, is demonstrated by its laying exposed to the air and frost on the highways to repair which it is often used, where it soon loses the power of adhesion, and resumes its original looseness, leaving the shells perfect, and entirely disencumbered from any other matter, which shells are of the same kind as belong to fish now found in such sands; therefore, when the petrifaction of the rocky matter took place, all the fish that were lodged in the sands that became fixed, must be involved in the same fate, and although the exuviæ of fish are found in many sorts of stones, yet in the calcareous rock, and most others, they lay in masses, which from their heterogenity appear to owe their situation to accident; but in sand-stone they are in general more regularly distributed, more perfect, and the same species that now inhabit sands to which these stones bear the nearest resemblance when pulverized and as it is known, beyond the possibility of doubt, that these animals cannot exist in any other than sea water, so it must be an equal truism that the lands whereon such wreck is found must have been immersed in that element for an immense space of time. : Nor do I think that this first creation, which I have supposed to be the inhabitants of the sea, and such as dwelt beneath the surface of the sands, were all destroyed when the land became a fixed substance, particularly the for. mer, and the Deity thereby compelled to a new creation: there are plausible grounds to suppose that many regions even of sands, I i fast. To this the principal part of the unevenness of the earth's surface may owe its origin : an ingenious eye will often see this idea illustrated, when he looks from an eminence over an extensive plain, in which a few hills are thinly scattered, though the imagination will be considerably assisted, if the beholder ever saw ships, or other large bodies sinking in the sea, as they generally turn on their sides, or descend by an inclination of the head or steru; then to finish the description, he must conceive a sudden freezing of the water to take place, and suspend the ships partly immersed. Of a hill which rises like an hemisphere where the strata are regular and uushattered, they are continued with equal thickness, from the top down the sides, until they are abruptly broken off. Now had these been formed by the sediments of water resting on an inclined plain, according to the theory of Monsieur Buf fon, or had their extremities been quite soft when lifted from the regular surface, the with the various layers of earth, did not undergo any change, or its inhabitants receive injury; 1 mean those which were situated on the contracting sides of the earth, and were not lifted above the surface of the water; the particles of sands in which they dwelt being too large to be brought to the point of adhesion, like those whose constituent parts were of finer atoms, as stones may increase in their density in proportion to the minuteness of the particles whereof they are composed. So it is probable these rocks which are now the hardest, were most weighty and ductile before crystallization; sand-stone being far inferior to most others in hardness, and some of them so loosely conjoined as barely to adhere to gether, but from the largeness of their interstices only, did these masses become a proper residence for the animals now found therein; as the more heavy and finer part of the stony substance, which are now the hardest rocks, consisting of smaller atoms, prevented the admission of a sufficient quantity of air to support life, and consequently were unin-layers of the sides must have been thinner habited, and in all probability covered with a thick coat of coarser particies of stone and earthy matter equally firm, as the sands now beneath the sea; and the wreck of fishes which are found in mountains composed of these finer particles might be drawn into them by the motion of the water, when the rocky body was in a state of softness; for the occan meeting with no resistance, moved regularly round the globe, from east to west, except the variation which was caused by the attraction of the sun and moon; by this action of the sea, the exuviæ of its inhabitants might be distributed and blended for some depth over the whole mass: or if that was prevented by the coats of sand which covered it, it might at the time of fixation, by its rolling motion and boiling up of the internal matter, envelope some marine with other substances, that laid on its surface. The fissures of rocks seem to be the natural effects of concretion or crystallization; the layers in hills and rising grounds being in general parallel with the surface, is presumptive proof that the exterior of the rocky mass was fixed some time before the interior, which by being pushed forward as it formed caused those parallel and vertical cracks: at other places, by bursting the incrustated part asunder in large chasms, many of the pieces of fixed matter became insulated, some of which were in the act of overturning, and being immersed by the motion of the fluid on which it rested, and in this floating state, the soft matter seems to have become solid and held them || than at the top; and that in proportion as those sides were inclined to the horizon. The violent runnings off of the sea from the land when the continents immerged therefrom, must cause many masses of the skeletons of the inhabitants to be collected where that element met with any obstruction in hurling them towards its present repository; and such are often found in different places on the earth. This, some of the most ingenious and learned men have laboured to shew, was produced by the general deluge, or what is called Noah's flood: the earth, it seems, was at that time covered with the water one hundred and fifty days, too short a period for oysters, muscles, &c. to arrive at a state of maturity, and be established in such large beds. This flood, it is to be proved, did not make much alteration on the face of the land, as the trees, and most probably other plants, continued alive, standing in their places, and the former not disrobed of their foliage; which is confirmed by the dove's returning with the leaf plucked from the olive-tree, a convincing proof also, there was no great commotion or agitation of the waters; therefore those shells were not driven on the land at that time by its vio leuce; as a force sufficient to do this would have thrown down and torn up all the trees, and have sent them floating on the surface, from whence a leaf might have been as easily gathered at the middle, or any period of the deluge, as at its decrease. No theory I imagine, but the supposed ro tundity of the land, its softuess and concretion, can account for the wreck of fish being found on mountains; when we consider the ocean must have diminished near four miles in perpendicular height all over the world, if it ever did cover the tops of the hills in their present state; and how can we conceive a cavern to be left void in the globe capable of absorbing such a quantity of that element, more, perhaps, than is now contained in this planet? nor, I conclude, will it be less difficult to think, how mountains could be formed by the currents of the water, admitting there had been enough to immerse them, particularly with such pointed or rugged heads and sides as those are found to have that were pushed through the coarse layers of earth and sands under which it crystallized: the sediments of water may create banks, but never could produce a rugged mountain. But when we place ourselves between two bigh hills of hard rock, which have not been defaced by time or accident, and compare them on either hand, you will often find the convex parts of the one exactly to correspond with the concave of the other, which most clearly shews that they have been rended asunder; now if we conceive the exterior of the earth to be first incrustated as beforementioned, the motion caused by the fixation of the matter beneath, the pushing forward of these parts which now appear above the sea, and contraction of the most of what is still under it, did compel the projecting surface to expand in proportion as its elvation augmented the circumference of the globe; which was an effort of matter to return again to its primitive circular figure; therefore divided the rocks, as we burst the rind of a twig by the bending it to form a boop; thus the mountains as they advanced in height retired from each other. At the time of fixation, it is reasonable to suppose, from the irregular compression of the solid exterior parts on those beneath in a fluid state, the latter must at some places be pressed up through many of the chasms, and so high as to become mountains. To this the hills called Dartmoor, in Devonshire, appear to owe their origin: this range, consisting of granite and other heavy stone loaded with ore, probably had its station beneath the calcareous rock, red sand-stone and slate, which compose the chief part of the county; but the land opening for the causes before given, the south part of it sinking into the great chasm now the British, and the north into that called St. George's Channel, caused a rent or fissure in the middle of the county || of twenty miles long, and about ten wide, which was immediately filled with the frid body, the sinking fixed masses forced up, and formed these bills; for whoever examines the soil and face of the country, particularly the parts bordering on the confines of the mountains on the north and south, will, I imagine, have little room to doubt, but they were once united, rended asunder, and the matter which constitutes these bills obtruded itself between. If the land was not soft and had altered its shape by crystallization, it would be difficult to form an idea how any loose or sandy substance could gradually collect, according to Monsieur Buffon's theory, and form itself across the globe, so as to resist the impetuosity of the ocean, or by any other means than that of a general concretion, as nothing less than a mass of solid rock could stop it; particularly when the narrowness of the land be observed that joins North and South America; for it should be considered, that all banks formed in the sea owe their origin to some obstruction the current meets with in pursuing its regular course. That the great mass of solid matter we call land, was once in a state of fluidity will, in my humble opinion, receive considerable support from the resemblance which many soft bodies bear to various parts of stones, when they become firm, and none has fallen within my sphere of observation that strikes more forcibly (however unphilosophical it might sound) than is to be found in a soap manufactory; the liquid in which the oils, rezins, &c. are dissolved, being drawn from lime, and strongly impregnated with the vegetable alkali and marine salt, may be expected to produce some resemblance, between a body thus composed and that of the marble, from whence the menstruum chiefly derives its fixing quality: when these materials are sufficiently impreg nated with the salts contained therein, it becomes when cold a solid substance, throwing off as it fixes all the watery matter more than is necessary to give it a proper degree of firmness in the soap called by the manufacturers mottled, the idea will receive more support than from any other, by being placed in a larger vessel to congeal, and remaining undisturbed by the maker until it be quite firm; then if it be cut in a direction perpendicular to its base, it will have all the appearance of a variegated piece of marble: its transparency in the channels where the liquid has been forced through in its way to the bottom, by the congelation of the soap, will be found to resemble strongly the crystalline veins of the |