OCR Text |
Show 14 PYTHAGOREAN SYSTEM. cities of Helice and Buris, for example, are to be seen under the sea with their walls inclined. 11. Plains have been upheaved into hills by the confined air seeking vent, as at 'l'rrezen in the ~eloponn~se. . 1fl. The temperature of some sprmgs varies at different periods. lS. The waters of others are inflammable • .. 14. Extraordinary medicinal and deleterto~s effects are produced by the water of difl'erent lakes a~d sprmgs t·. 15. Some rocks and islands, after floatmg, and havm~ been subject to violent movements, have at length beco~e statiOnary and immoveable, as Delos and the Cyanean Isles t. . 16. Volcanic vents shift their position; there was a time when Etna was not a burning mountain, and the time will come when it will cease to burn. Whether it be that some caverns become closed up by the movements of the earth, and others opened, or whether the fuel is fin.ally .exhausted, &c. ~c. The various causes of change in the mammate world having been thus enumerated, the doctrine of equivocal generation is next propounded, as illustrating a corresponding perpetual flux in the animate creation§. >l< This is probably an allusion to the escape of inflammable gas, like that~ the district of Baku, west of the Caspian .; at Pietra-mala, in the Tuscan Apenmnes i and several other places. t Many of those described seem fanciful fictions, like the virtues still so com· monly attributed to mineral waters. t Raspe, in a learned and judicious essay (chap. 19, de novis.in~ulis), h~s made it appear extremely probable that all the traditions of certam 1slands m the Mediterranean having at some former time frequently shifted their position, and at length become stationary, originated in the great change produced in their form by earthquakes and submarine eruptions, of which there have been modern examples in the new islands raised in the time of history. When the series of con· vulsions ended, the island was ~;aid to become fixed. § It is not inconsistent with the Hindoo mythology to suppose, that Pythagoras might have found in the East not only the system of universal and violent catas· trophes and periods of repose in endless succession, but also that of periodical · revolutions, effected by the continued agency of ordinary causes. For Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, the first, second, and third persons of the Hindoo triad, severally represented the Creative, the Preserving, and the Destroying powers of the Deity. The co-existence of these three attributes, all in simultaneouR operation, might well accord with the notion of perpetual but partial alterations finally bringing about a complete change. But the fiction expressed in the verses before quoted from Menu, of eternal vicissitudes in the vigils and slumbers of the Infinite Being' seems accommodated to the system of great general catastrophes followed by ne'lf creations and periods of repose. ARISTOTELIAN SYSTEM. 15 In the Egyptian aud Eastern cosmogonies, and in the Greek version of them, no very definite meaning can, in general, be attached to the term '' destruction of the world,'' for sometimes it would seem almost to imply the annihilation of our planetary system, and at others a mere revolution of the surface of the earth. From the workg now extant of Aristotle, and from the system of Pythagoras, as above exposed, we might certainly infer that these philosophers considered the agents of change now operating in Nature, as capable of bringing about in the lapse of ages a complete revolution; and the Stagyrite even considers occasional catastrophes, happening at distant intervals of time, as part of the regular and ordinary course of Nature. The deluge of Deucalion, he says, affected Greece only, and principally the part called Hellas, and it arose from great inundations of rivers during a rainy winter. But such extraordinary winters, he says, though after a certain period they return, do not always revisit the same places*. Censorinus quotes it as Aristotle's opinion, that there were general inundations of the globe, and that they alternated with conflagrations, and that the flood constituted the winter of the great year, or astronomical cycle, while the conflagration, or destruction by fire, is the summer or period of greatest heatt. If this passage, as Lipsius supposes, be an amplification by Censorinus, of what is written in " the Meteorics,'' it is a gross misrepresentation of the doctrine of the Stagyrite, for the general bearing of his reasoning in that treatise tends clearly in an opposite d.irection. He refers to many examples of changes now constantly going on, and insists emphatically on the great results which they must produce in the lapse of ages. He instances particular cases of lakes that had dried up, and deserts that had at length become watered by rivers and fertilized. He points to the growth of the Nilotic delta since the time of Homer, to the shallowing of the Palus l\1reotis within sixty years from his own time, and although, in the same chapter, he says nothing of earthquakes, yet in others of the same treatise:f:, he shews himself not unacquainted with their efFects. * Meteor. lib. i. cap. xii. t De Die. N'at. t Lib. ii. cap. 141 15, and 16. |