testify God's displeasure against sin. Yet that great changes in the fabric of the globe were afterwards effected, is historically proved, by a circumstance which is only mentioned incidentally-but which is not on that account of less consequence to our consideration, and from which we may also venture to infer, that other events of a striking and important character may have been well known in those remote ages, without having been judged worthy of distinct mention in Scripture. For such omission many reasons might be assigned; such as that they involved schemes of a distantly prospective character, or were built on philosophical relations of propriety or necessity, that even with our present understanding of such considerations, would not fall within the limits of human understanding. It is probable that we owe the little we are acquainted with, of the convulsions in the days of Peleg, (Gen. x. 25.) to the simple and apparently trivial circumstance of his having received his name from the occurrence of that event. That we are not wrong in attributing the division of the earth, recorded to have occurred in the days of Peleg, to a convulsion of the globe, rather than to any political distribution of lands or nations, is corroborated by the opinion of the learned Bochart; who informs us, that the word Peleg is properly descriptive of a natural disruption by the sea: and that such violent changes have occurred, on various other cccasions, is shown by ancient traditions, many of which have found a place in the mythology of Heathen nations. The flood of Deucalion, described by Ovid, is supposed, on good grounds, to have been of a local character; though in the course of time this event and the circumstances attending it, have become confounded with the great deluge of Noah. The writers of Scripture, to express more forcibly and adequately their ideas, often borrow the strong language descriptive of one event, to depict another somewhat resembling it, though perhaps the resemblance may be only metaphorical. Thus we find David speaking of the Lord's coming to rescue and save himself, in language descriptive of his descent upon Mount Sinai : although in his own case no open manifestation of miraculous power was seen; and in the book of Revelation the fall of the political and moral constitution of the Roman empire is prophetically spoken of, as the falling of the sun and stars, and the dissolution of the structure of the globe itself. We need not wonder therefore if this figurative mode of expression, which is not confined to the sacred writers, but belongs to the class of poetical amplification common to oriental imagination, has sometimes led those of succeeding times to confound together events of a similar character, but of different extent, and occurring from different causes or in a different age.

The remarkable tradition preserved by Plato, may also be associated with the geological mutations now under our consideration, since it is not improbable that it refers to what formed a part of them :-I quote from Ray's Three Discourses concerning Primitive Chaos, the General Deluge and the Dissolution of the World:-"The Egyptian priests related to Solon the Athenian lawgiver, who lived about 600 years before Christ, that there was of old time without the straits of Gibralter, a vast island, bigger than Africa and Asia together, called Atlantes, which was afterwards by a violent earthquake, and mighty flood, and inundation of water, in one day and night wholly overwhelmed and drowned in the sea." This, it must be confessed, is a very brief account of an event, of which we must lament that it is now too late to indulge the hope of learning further particulars: but next to the great deluge it must have been the most awful natural phenomenon that has ever afflicted the human race. It seems however that other great natural changes have certainly occurred-forining altogether the links of a chain which connects the modern with the ancient constitution of the world. The remainder of the present paper will be devoted to an account of a, perhaps, somewhat similar geological and atmospheric mutation, which has attracted

attention only in modern times, but of which the existence can, at least, be traced to times far beyond the stretch of authentic record. The following account is abridged from an account of the mammoth or fossil elephant found in the ice, at the mouth of the river Lena, in Siberia, contained in the fifteenth number of the Quarterly Journal of Literature, Science, and the Arts, published at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, 1819, and which is itself taken from, the fifth volume of the memoirs of the Imperial Academy of Sciences at St. Petersburgh.

The term mammoth or fossil elephant has been made use of, with a view to correct a common mistake, in the application of the word mammoth, which is, in England, frequently given to the mastodon, of Cuvier; an animal, of which the remains are chiefly found on the banks of the Ohio, and in other parts of America. The Siberians have long applied the name of mammoth to the elephant, whose bones are very abundant in that country, and in many other parts of the world; and it is so used by writers on the continent. These remains, wherever found, belong to a species of elephant which is called by Cuvier the fossil elephant, and different from the two species now living on the globe. According to several writers the term mammoth is of Tartar origin, and is derived from mama, which signifies the earth; and the natives of Siberia give the name of, "bones of the mammoth to the remains of elephants which are found in great abundance in that country; believing that the mammoth is an animal which lives under ground at the present time. According to others the name is derived from behemoth, mentioned in the book of Job; or mehemoth, an epithet which the Arabs commonly add to the word elephant, to designate one which is very large. These bones and tusks are found throughout Russia, and more particularly in eastern Siberia and the arctic marshes. The tusks are found in great quantities, and the ivory of them is equal to that of the living elephants of Asia and Africa. Although for a long series of years very many thousands have been annually obtained, yet they are still collected every year in great numbers on the banks of the larger rivers of the Russian empire, and more particularly those of further Siberia. They abound most of all in the Laichovian Isles and on the shores of the Frozen sea. In digging wells, or foundations for buildings there are every where discovered the entire skeletons of elephants, which are very well preserved in the frozen soil of the country. The instances of these bones being found in the above-mentioned regions, and their great numbers, are so frequently stated by Russian travellers, that it may be fairly contended that the number of elephants now living on the globe is greatly inferior to the number of those whose bones are remaining in Siberia. It is particularly to be noticed that in all the climates and latitudes, from the range of mountains dividing Asia to the frozen shores of the Northern ocean, Siberia abounds with mammoth bones. The best fossil ivory is found in the countries near to the arctic circle, and in the most eastern regions, which are much colder than the parts of Europe under the same latitude, and where the soil in their very short summer is thawed only at the surface, and in some years not at all. In corroboration of this last remark, and of the conclusions presently to be drawn, the following account is given by the naturalist Gmelin, of the depth to which the ground is thawed in summer. "At Jakutsk, on the 8th of June, I ordered the ground to be dug in an elevated field, as deep as it was thawed. The mould extended to the depth of eleven inches; underneath it was sand, which was soft to the depth of two feet and a half, when it became harder; and after digging half a foot lower it was very hard, and scarcely yielded to the spade, so that the ground was thawed scarcely four feet. I directed the same experiment to be tried at a lower spot not far distant. The mould was ten inches deep, the soft sand two feet four inches, but below this every thing was frozen quite hard. Moreover various berries which the Jakutski consider

as delicacies, may be preserved in caves in the same state, that is, continually frozen, although the caves are scarcely the depth of six feet." In the year 1805, a Russian master of a vessel related, that he had lately seen a mammoth elephant dug up on the shores of the Frozen ocean, clothed with a hairy skin; and showed in confirmation of the fact, some hair three or four inches long of a reddish black colour, a little thicker than horse hair, which he had taken from the skin of the animal. No more is known of this curious fact, nor should we now possess any information respecting the carcase of the mammoth, which forms more particularly the subject of the present remarks, if the rumour of its discovery had not reached Mr. Adams, who undertook the labour of a journey to those frozen regions. While making enquiries in furtherance of the object which had brought him into Siberia, Mr. Adams was told at Jakutsk, by the merchant Popoff, that there had been discovered on the shores of the Frozen ocean near the mouth of the river Lena, an animal of extraordinary magnitude. The flesh, the skin, and the hair were in a state of preservation, and it was supposed that the fossil production known under the name of mammoth's horns, must have belonged to an animal of this species. Mr. Adams visited the place, and obtained some very important observations from the native Jurgusian who was the first to make the discovery. It was in 1799 that he perceived among the blocks of ice a shapeless mass, which attracted his attention without his being able to guess at its nature; and it was not until the year 1803 that by the melting of the ice it was sufficiently disengaged as to fall from its situation. Two years after this, Mr. Adams visited the place, and he found the mammoth still in the same place, though altogether mutilated. The people of the neighbourhood had cut off portions of the flesh, with which they fed their dogs during the scarcity, wild beasts also fed upon it, but the bones remained attached by their ligaments, the head was covered with a dry skin, and one of the ears, well preserved, was furnished with a tuft of hairs; and after being conveyed to the distance of 7,330 miles the pupil of the left eye could still be distinguished. The entire carcase was nine feet four inches high, and sixteen feet four inches from the nose to the end of the tail without including the tusks, which measure three feet seven inches, from root to point in a straight line, and nine feet six inches measuring along the curve. The ice in which it was originally inclosed is clear and pure; and the mass, which is situated between two points of the peninsula at the mouth of the river, was from thirty-five to forty fathoms high; the animal being seven fathoms below the surface.

We draw the following observations from the circumstances which we have related or referred to, as connected with the discovery of this animal, and they will be found to throw important light on one of the remarkable changes, that in a distant but not extravagantly remote age, passed over the surface of our globe.

Fossil wood is at least as abundant in the further Siberia, as tusks of the mammoth; and that it grew to maturity in the country is proved from the circumstances in which it is found: and yet, for as far back as any authentic tradition extends, no wood has been known to sustain the severity of the cold. The elephant tribe feeds chiefly on such herbage; and the numbers of those creatures that can have supplied the fossil bones of these regions is a proof, both that their permanent residence was in the land, and that there was no deficiency of food to sustain them. That this period in the history of the world, when the now naked regions of the extreme north, inhabited only by a few wild animals, which are either sufficiently small to subsist on birdsor if larger, which derive a precarious support from the sea-has been subjected to a sudden change, in which the elephant, and perhaps the wood, became extinct; and that the era of this occurrence was long after that of the great flood of Noah, will appear from the following considerations:--The elephant had multiplied to fill the country of Siberia, and to extend itself in

multitudes along the land, even of America, that encircles the great Polar basin; for in these districts also its remains have been found; and the individual so well preserved on the banks of the Lena, had while yet alive become encircled on all sides by solid ice, on which it stood, and along which it must have walked before it expired, to be preserved from putrefaction for the wonder and study of the naturalist of far distant ages. It must not be objected that such ice may have continued from times before the flood; for the water of the deluge could not have failed to dissolve it, when for a whole year they covered the earth: neither could so large a bulk have floated on that shoreless ocean for that space of time, without suffering decomposition; whereas, in the instance we are contemplating, even the iris of the eye, the most evanescent of animal substances, was fixed by the piercing cold, before it had time to suffer any change of structure whatever. The flesh also was so little altered from exposure, maceration in water, or internal decay, before it had become enclosed in the mass of ice, that the dogs and wild animals devoured it with eagerness.

SUPERSTITION AND FOLLY OF MODERN POPERY. (For the Wesleyan Methodist Association Magazine.)

How true it is that popery in its absurdities, and ridiculous observances, even in the midst of the light and knowledge of the nineteenth century, is "unchanged," and apparently "unchangeable!" You cannot take up a modern book of travels, or a recent tour on the continent of Europe, if its author has had the usual curiosity of strangers, to visit the cathedrals and churches of the papacy, and examine the " relics," preserved for the admiration, not to say the worship of the faithful-in which you will not find accounts of the most absurd and disgusting attempts on the part of the priesthood, to impose upon the credulity, and drain the pockets of ignorant dupes. One would imagine, that it must levy a rather severe tax upon the gravity of English protestants, to listen with decent composure of countenance, to the tales of wonder and miracle, connected with an old tooth, a bone, or a lock of hair of some reputed saint, who is probably reported to have quitted this lower world some hundreds of years ago, the virtue of whose piety, and wonder working power, it is affirmed has been perpetuated, in this said relic, through all the subsequent generations, for the special benefit of all the faithful.

But we need not be at the trouble of a journey to the continent, in order to find the superstitions and follies of modern popery; for a more than tolerable share may be met with, almost at our own doors, in the sister country Ireland. It would hardly be deemed credible, were not the fact established beyond all doubt, that multitudes of our Irish fellow subjects, are in the habit of assembling together once a year at Lough Derry, to which place they go on a pilgrimage, some of them scores of miles; and after washing away their sins in the lake, doing the penance of walking upon their bare knees, over a rocky road, round the sacred wall of an old monastery; upon the accomplishment of this popish Juggernaut feat, the credulous dupes receive full and complete absolution for all their sins, at the hands of the priesthood, and then they retire from the spot, only to indulge in the lowest and most degrading debaucheries, but with the most unshaken confidence, that they have infallibly opened to themselves the gate of heaven. Such however is the case; and that benighted and miserable country, abounds with practices among the Roman Catholic peasantry, equally gross and revolting.

It is not to be wondered at, that the more illiterate part of the Romish church should be so besotted, and so much under the influence of earthly and sensual impulses, when it is considered that the entire system of the papal hierarchy, in its services and institutions, is calculated and designed to operate upon the passions, and rarely, if ever appeals to the judgment and understanding. But whilst this is a truth applicable to the entire Romish world, it is remarkable, with what force, it more especially applies to those countries which have been what is termed, "converted" from paganism to romanism. My mind has been forcibly struck with this view of the subject, as well as with the general grossness, and absence of spirituality in the religious services of the papacy, by perusing a highly interesting, and instructive volume designated, "Life in Mexico," published in 1843, and written by an eminent lady, a Scotch woman by birth; the wife of a minister plenipotentiary, from the court of Spain to Mexico, and a devout Roman Catholic. It is surprising that she should have the honesty and courage, to publish to the world what indeed is but the truth, and which could hardly escape a mind so vigorous and powerful, as the work proves its author to possess. But for such announcements, made to those who are beyond the pale of their own church, depend upon it, the Romish priesthood will give her no thanks.

It is well known to be a part of the system pursued by Popish missionaries among the heathen, in order to induce them to adopt the crucifix, and submit to the initiatory rite of baptism, to propose but little, if any change in their previous modes of worship; only adding such prayers and offerings to the virgin, and other saints, and the celebration of the mass, as may serve to identify them externally with the church of Rome. It is evident from the following passage, that the profession of either paganism or Christianity, can make but little difference in the lives or moral condition of the poor creatures referred to; but who by baptism had been introduced into the visible church. The writer remarks (page 257.), "The cross was planted here (Mexico) in a congenial soil, and as in the Pagan east, the statues of the divinities frequently did no more than change their names from those of heathen gods to those of Christian saints, and image worship apparently continued, though the mind of the Christian was directed from the being represented to the true and only God who inhabits eternity; so here the poor Indian still bows before the visible representations of saints and virgins, as he did in former days, before the monstrous shapes representing the unseen powers of the air, the earth, and the water; but he it is to be feared lifts his thoughts no higher than the ruder image, which a ruder hand has carved. He kneels before the bleeding image of the Saviour who died for him, before the gracious form of the virgin who intercedes for him; but he believes that there are many virgins, of various gifts, and possessing various degrees of miraculous powers, and different degrees of wealth, according to the quality and number of the diamonds and pearls with which they are endowed-one even who is the rival of the other-one who will bring rain when there is drought, and one to whom it is well to pray in seasons of inundation." And yet these are members of the only true church, and under the care and instruction of the successors of the apostles! It would be difficult for a protestant pen to depict in more forcible language the awfully degraded condition of that church.

I am tempted, at the risk of intrenching somewhat upon your pages to transcribe the following mummery, as evidence of the entire absence of spirituality in the services and feasts of the Romish church; and of the evident attempt there is to assimilate them to the spirit and practice of the world. "We are now (she remarks, page 286) "approaching the holy week once more,in Mexico a scene of variety in the streets, and of splendour in the churches; but in the country a play, a sort of melo-drama, in which the sufferings, death, and burial of our Saviour are represented by living figures