Medea cut the wither’d weasand Of superannuated Æson, Then fill’d him with the acrid juices Of nettle-tops and flower-de-luces; Till from the defunct carcase, lo! Starts a full blooded Bond street beau!!
Medea cut the wither’d weasand Of superannuated Æson, Then fill’d him with the acrid juices Of nettle-tops and flower-de-luces; Till from the defunct carcase, lo! Starts a full blooded Bond street beau!!
Chymistry furnishes us with a method of manufacturing _artificial_ earthquakes, which will have all the great effects of those that are natural. The old-fashioned receipt for an earthquake, however, of iron filings and sulphur mixed in certain proportions and immersed in the earth, I shall not take the trouble to state to your worships; as most of you have, _perhaps_, read Mr Martin’s Philosophy nearly half through. But my plan is to make such an earthquake as no mortal, except Dr Darwin and myself, ever supposed possible. The former gentleman made shift to explode the moon from the _southern_ hemisphere of our earth, and I propose to forward other moons by artificial earthquakes of my own invention, from the _northern_ hemisphere. I will give your worships a specimen of Dr Darwin’s moon-producing earthquake, from “_Botanic Garden_,” Canto I.
“Gnomes! How you shriek’d! when through the troubled air, Roar’d the fierce din of elemental war; When rose the continents, and sunk the main, And earth’s huge sphere exploding burst in twain.-- Gnomes! How you gazed! When from her wounded side, Where now the _South_ sea heaves its waste of tide, Rose on swift wheels the Moon’s refulgent car, Circling the solar orb, a sister star, Dimpled with vales, with shining hills emboss’d, And roll’d round earth her airless realms of frost.”
Parturiunt montes nascetur ridiculus mus.
The reaction, at the moment of explosion, of that mass of matter which now composes our moon, is the cause of the obliquity of the polar axis to the poles of the ecliptic, according to Dr Darwin; though Milton says,
“----Angels turn’d askance The poles of earth twice ten degrees and more: From the sun’s axle, they with labor push’d Oblique the centric globe.”--
Whether an explosion similar to that, so beautifully described by Dr Darwin, from the _north_ side of the equator, would not set all right, and a new era be announced, which will be, like that of old, when