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Show 258 PROGRESS OF RUIN. as the active operations which are carried on in populous and busy city, reduce streets, and houses. and furniture to dust, and prepare them !or the brickmakers and the builders; so that the c1ty may partly do in fact what was fabled of the phenixarise arrain out of its own ashes. If the bnckmaker and th~ builder were to stay their hands, the city would soon become uninhabitable; then it would be a ruin ; and then, again, and not very long after, it would become dust, and dust not to be known from the other dust of the earth. The places of many cities of which the histories are fully recorded, are dow matters of uncertainty even to the most believing of antiquaries; and in cases ~here they are determined, it is not done by that wh1ch has been ruined but by that which has escaped from ruin. When ~e speak about seeing " the ruins" of Ro~e, or of any city or edifice, we speak about that wh1ch we cannot see. What is left is what we perceive, not what is ruined, and to find a former city in the dust is about the same as to predict a future one in the quarry. And even that which we find tells _us of nothing but itself; and when we come to a bnck or part of a broken altar, we are no more warranted in coming to the conclusion that "here there _has been a city or a temple," than that nearly extmct race of hunters for marvels were warranted to conclude, upon coming to the scoria of the old "beal fires" at the ''vitrified forts,'' that "here has been a volcano." But it is with ancient cities as with their inhabitants; they cannot rise out o~ the dust and contradict any thing that may be sa1d about them, however imaginary or incorrect ~hat may be ;. and thus the antiquary, like the histonan, gets cred1t for telling the truth, simply because ~obody can contradict him by an appeal to observatiOn. Those remarks may at first view seem foreign to the purpose of these pages ; but that is ~y _no mea:1s , the case; for it is highly probable, nay, It IS certam, that, because the word "History" has been made 1. ·, ... ··- ....... \ . ' PROGRESS OF RUIN. 259 part of ~he name of the description of nature, the o~~ervatwn and know ledge of nature have been VItiated. .The say_ing is common, even to a proverb, that the htsto~y of any l?eriod, whatever may be the events ?f which that htstory is to give an account :-e_v~n If they are the occurrences in the life of one mdivtdual, cannot .he properly written, till many year~ after the penod has elapsed. We shall not mqmre why .that. should be the case, because the ~esu,lt ?f the mqmry might not be very satisfactory· · ut If It be true, as it is very generally said to be' . t~at the events of history are the better understood t e further t~e study of them is remov'ed from actual ob~ervatwn, most .as~uredly the reverse is the case Wit~ nature; for m It, nothinrr but immediate observa~wn ~an be .relied on; and that which, it seems, IS philosophiC truth in the successions of huhman co!lduct, is error, and nothing but error w en applied to the knowledge of thinrrs. ' fJf there were nothing in nature but the properties o ~atter, the agencies of light and heat, and those actwns of substa?ces upon ~a~h other, which can, ~holly, or even IJ? part, be Imitated in the labora~ ory of the chymist, then nature would altogether oe m progress towards destruction. 'l'he tendency of a~l those po~ers is to produce inorganic masses th masses ?f which the one part is not necessary for . e operatiOn of t.he others; but of which any portiO~ may be considered as a whole, whatever ma be Its form and magnitude. The heat of a burnin; t?per, though not the same in degree, is just as en~ tlrel~ heat as that of Etna during an eruption and ~he hght of the sa~e taper is just as completely iight as that of the mid-day sun. So also if the water 0i ~pond were to be divided into com{tless millions o rops, each of them would be just as much a wh~le as the entire contents of the pond, and as per ectly water as the ocean. It is the same with . all the metals, stones, earths, and other substances |
