By the Will of God
Here, upon the Brink of these Deserts,
Which from this Point begin and stretch away
Pathless, treeless, waterless,
For thousands of miles—and along the margins
of many mighty Nations,
Rested from their labors and from great afflictions
Under the shadow of the Chinese Wall,
And by the favor of KIEN LONG, God’s Lieutenant
upon Earth,
The ancient Children of the Wilderness—the
Torgote Tartars
Flying before the wrath of the Grecian Czar,
Wandering Sheep who had strayed away from the Celestial
Empire in the
year 1616,
But are now mercifully gathered again, after infinite
sorrow,
Into the fold of their forgiving Shepherd.
Hallowed be the spot for ever,
and
Hallowed be the day—September 8, 1771!
Amen.
END OF VOLUME I.
SYSTEM OF THE HEAVENS AS REVEALED BY LORD ROSSE’S TELESCOPES.
[Footnote: Thoughts on Some Important Points relating to the System of
the World. By J. P. Nichol, LL.D., Professor of Astronomy in the
University of Glasgow. William Tait, Edinburgh. 1846.]
Some years ago, some person or other, [in fact I believe
it was myself,] published a paper from the German
of Kant, on a very interesting question, viz.,
the age of our own little Earth. Those who have
never seen that paper, a class of unfortunate people
whom I suspect to form rather the majority
in our present perverse generation, will be likely
to misconceive its object. Kant’s purpose
was, not to ascertain how many years the Earth had
lived: a million of years, more or less, made
very little difference to him. What he
wished to settle was no such barren conundrum.
For, had there even been any means of coercing the
Earth into an honest answer, on such a delicate point,
which the Sicilian canon, Recupero, fancied that there
was; [Footnote: Recupero. See Brydone’s
Travels, some sixty or seventy years ago. The
canon, being a beneficed clergyman in the Papal church,
was naturally an infidel. He wished exceedingly
to refute Moses: and he fancied that he really
had done so by means of some collusive assistance
from the layers of lava on Mount Etna. But there
survives, at this day, very little to remind us of
the canon, except an unpleasant guffaw that rises,
at times, in solitary valleys of Etna.] but which,
in my own opinion, there neither is, nor ought to be,—
(since a man deserves to be cudgelled who could put
such improper questions to a lady planet,)—still
what would it amount to? What good would it do
us to have a certificate of our dear little mother’s
birth and baptism? Other people—people
in Jupiter, or the Uranians—may amuse themselves
with her pretended foibles or infirmities: it
is quite safe to do so at their distance; and,
in a female planet like Venus, it might be natural,
(though, strictly speaking, not quite correct,) to
