veniences and comforts of social life, but its elegances and innocent pleasures, and even the gratification of a natural and laudable curiosity; for, though labour be clearly the lot of man in this world, yet, in the midst of his most active exertions, he cannot but feel the substantial benefit of every liberal amusement which may lull his passions to rest, and afford him a sort of repose without the pain of total inaction, and the real usefulness of every pursuit which may enlarge and diversify his ideas, without interfering with the principal objects of his civil station or economical duties; nor should we wholly exclude even the trivial and worldly sense of utility, which too many consider as merely synonymous with lucre, but should reckon among useful objects those practical, and by no means illiberal arts, which may eventually conduce both to national and to private emolument. With a view then to advantages thus explained, let us examine every point in the whole circle of arts and sciences, according to the received order of their dependence on the faculties of the mind, their mutual connexion, and the different subjects with which they are conversant: our inquiries indeed, of which Nature and Man are the primary objects, must of course be chiefly Historical; but since we propose to investigate the actions of the several

Asiatic nations, together with their respective progress in science and art, we may arrange our investigations under the same three heads to which our European analysis has ingeniously reduced all the branches of human knowledge; and my present Address to the Society shall be confined to History, civil and natural, or the observation and remembrance of mere facts independently of ratiocination, which belongs to philosophy; orof imitations and substitutions, which are the province of art.

Were a superior created intelligence to delineate a map of general knowledge (exclusively of that sublime and stupendous theology, which himself could only hope humbly to know by an infinite approximation) he would probably begin by tracing with Newton the system of the universe, in which he would assign the true place to our little globe; and having enumerated its various inhabitants, contents, and productions, would proceed to man in his natural station among animals, exhibiting a detail of all the knowledge attained or attainable by the human race; and thus observing perhaps the same order in which he had before described other beings in other inhabited worlds; but though Bacon seems to have had a similar reason for placing the History of Nature before that of Man, or the whole before one of its parts,

yet, consistently with our chief object already mentioned, we may properly begin with the Civil History of the Five Asiatic Nations, which necessarily comprizes their geography, or a description of the places where they have acted, and their astronomy, which may enable us to fix with some accuracy the time of their actions: we shall thence be led to the history of such other animals, of such minerals, and of such vegetables as they may be supposed to have found in their several migrations and settlements, and shall end with the uses to which they have applied, or may apply, the rich assemblage of natural substances.

I. In the first place, we cannot surely deem it aninconsiderable advantage that all our historical researches have confirmed the Mosaic accounts of the primitive world; and our testimony on that Subject ought to have the greater weight, because, if the result of our observations had been totally different, we should nevertheless have published them, not indeed with equal pleasure, but with equal confidence; for truth is mighty, and, whatever be its consequences, must always prevail : but, independently of our interest in corroborating the multiplied evidences of revealed religion, we could scarce gratify our minds with a more useful and rational entertainment than the contemplation

of those wonderful revolutions in kingdoms and states, which have happened within little more than four thousand years; revolutions almost as fully demonstrative of an all-ruling Providence as the structure of the universe, and the final causes which are discernible in its whole extent, and even in its minutest parts. Figure to your imaginations a moving picture of that eventful period, or rather a succession of crowded scenes rapidly changed. Three families migrate in different courses from one region, and, in about four centuries, establish very distant governments and various modes of society: Egyptians, Indians, Goths, Phenicians, Celts, Greeks, Latians, Chinese, Peruvians, Mexicans, all sprung from the same immediate stem, appear to start nearly at one time, and occupy at length those countries, to which they have given, or from which they have derived, their names. In twelve or thirteen hundred years more, the Greeks overrun the land of their forefathers, invade India, conquer Egypt, and aim at universal dominion; but the Romans appropriate to themselves the whole empire of Greece, and carry their arms into Britain, of which they speak with haughty contempt. The Goths, in the fulness of time, break to pieces the unwieldly Colossus of Roman power, and seize on the whole of Britain, except its wild mountains; ``

but even those wilds become subject to other invaders of the same Gothic lineage. During all those transactions the Arabs possess both coasts of the Red Sea, subdue the old seat of their first progenitors, and extend their conquests, on one side, through Africa, into Europe itself; on another, beyond the borders of India, part of which they annex to their flourishing empire. In the same interval the Tartars, widely diffused over the rest of the globe, swarm in the north-east, whence they rush to complete the reduction of Constantine's beautiful domains, to subjugate China, to raise in these Indian realms a dynasty splendid and powerful, and to ravage, like the two other families, the devoted regions of Iran. By this time the Mexicans and Peruvians, with many races of adventurers variously intermixed, have peopled the continent and isles of America, which the Spaniards, having restored their old government in Europe, discover and in part overcome: but a colony from Britain, of which Cicero ignorantly declared that it contained nothing valuable, obtain the possession, and finally the sovereign dominion of extensive American districts; whilst other British subjects acquire a subordinate empire in the finest provinces of India, which the victorious troops of Alexander were unwilling to attack. This outline of human transactions, as