waters that are in the earth; in the fourth the great lights, the sun and the moon, and also the stars; in the fifth every volatile, reptile, and four-footed animal in the air, earth, and water; in the sixth man. It seems, therefore, according to them, that the first six thousand years were passed before the formation of man, and that mankind are to continue for the other six thousand years, the whole time of consummation being twelve thousand years. For they held, that the world was subject to certain revolutions, wherein it became transformed, and a new age and generation began; of such generations there had been in all, according to them, eight, differing from one another in customs and way of life; each having a duration of a certain number of years assigned them by God, and determined by the period which they called the great year.[1] If Suidas can be depended on, and I know no reason to dispute his authority, we have here, among these Italian priests, in the six ages of creation, evident proofs of the identity of their doctrines with those of the Hindoos, the ancient Magi of Persia, and the books of Genesis. And what is more, we have, if Mons. Cuvier can be depended on, proofs that these very ancient philosophical priests all taught the true system of the universe, one of the most abstruse and recondite subjects in nature. To what is this to be attributed? Most clearly either to the learning of the primeval nation, or to revelation. Different persons will entertain different opinions on this subject.
There are few readers who have read my abstruse book thus far, who will be surprised that I should look back to an existent state of the Globe in a very remote period. I allude to a time when the angle which the plane of the ecliptic makes with the plane of the equator was much larger than it is at this moment; the effect of which would be to increase the heat in the polar regions, and render them comfortable places of residence for their inhabitants. This easily accounts for the remains of inhabitants of warm climates being found in those regions, which they probably occupied before the creation of man. Every extraordinary appearance of this kind is easily accounted for, as the effect of that periodical motion of the earth which, if continued, will bring the planes of the ecliptic and equator to coincide, and, in process of time, to become at right angles to one another. The circumstance of the animals of the torrid zone being found in the high latitudes near the poles, is itself a decisive proof, to an unprejudiced mind, that the time must have been when, by the passage of the Sun in his ecliptic his line of movement was much nearer the poles than it is now, the northern regions must have possessed a temperate climate. This shews, in a marked manner, the sagacity of the observations of Buffon, Baillie, Gesner, &c., though ridiculed by weak people, that the northern climes were probably the birth-place of man. For though in the cause which they assigned for this they might be mistaken, in the effect they were correct.
7. The date of Pythagoras’s birth has been much disputed by learned men. After what the reader has seen, he will not be surprised to find this great philosopher connected, as has been already noticed from the work of La Loubère, like the Jewish worthies, Augustus Cæsar, and others, with one of the Neroses. And the circumstance that the discovery has much of the nature of accident, or, at least, that it is not made out by me or any person holding my system, adds greatly to the probability of its truth. Dr. Lempriere, after stating the great uncertainty of the date of Pythagoras, says, “that 75 or 85 years of the life of Pythagoras fall within the 142 years that elapsed between B. C. 608, and B. C. 466.” Here 608, the boundary of his period, evidently bring out the cycle of the greater Neros. Whether the date of Christ be quite correct or not, there is no doubt that the learned men, who have at different times endeavoured to fix it,
- ↑ Anonym. apud Suid. in voce Tyrrheni, Univers. Hist. Vol. I. p. 64.—The Universal History adds, that the Druids also taught the alternate dissolution of the world by water and fire, and its successive renovation. Ibid.
