Is it the thousandth part, or the millionth?

Our mother

Tellus, beyond all doubt, is a lovely little thing. At any rate, therefore, she cannot be superannuated. I am satisfied that she is very much admired throughout the Solar System; and, in clear seasons, when she is seen to advantage, with her bonny wee pet of a Moon tripping round her like a lamb, I should be glad to see the planet that could fancy herself entitled to sneeze at our Earth. And then, if she (viz. our Earth) keeps but one Moon, even that (you know) is an advantage as regards some people that keep

none.

Meantime, what Kant understood by his question is something that still remains to be developed. It is this:— Let the earth have lived any number of years that you suggest, still that tells us nothing about the period of life, the stage, which she may be supposed to have reached. Is she a child, in fact, or is she an adult? And, if an adult, and that you gave a ball to the Solar System, is she that kind of person that you would introduce to a waltzing partner, some fiery young gentleman like Mars; or would you rather suggest to her the sort of partnership which takes place at a whist-table? Some think that our planet is in that stage of her life which corresponds to the playful period of twelve or thirteen in a spirited girl. Such a girl, were it not that she is checked by a sweet natural sense of feminine reserve, you might call a romp; but not a hoyden, observe; no horseplay; oh no, nothing of that sort. And these people fancy that earthquakes, volcanoes, and all such little escapades, will be over, will "cease and determine," as soon as our Earth reaches the age of maidenly bashfulness. Poor thing! It's quite natural, you know, in a healthy growing girl. A little overflow of vivacity, a pirouette more or less, an earthquake plus or minus, what harm should that do to any of us! Nobody takes more delight than I in the fawn-like sportiveness of an innocent girl at this period of life; even a shade of espiéglerie does not annoy me. But still my own impressions incline me rather to represent the Earth as a fine noble young woman, full of the pride which is so becoming to her sex, and well able to take her own part, in case that, at any solitary point of the heavens, she should come across

one of those vulgar fussy Comets disposed to be rude and take improper liberties.

But others there are, a class whom I perfectly abominate, that place our Earth in the category of decaying, nay, of decayed women. Hair like arctic snows, failure of vital heat, palsy that shakes the head as in the porcelain toys on our mantelpieces, asthma that shakes the whole fabricthese they absolutely fancy themselves to see; they absolutely hear the tellurian lungs wheezing, panting, crying "Bellows to mend !" periodically as the Earth approaches her aphelion.1

Suddenly at this point a demur arises upon the total question. Kant's very problem explodes, as Venetian wineglasses of old were shivered by any treacherous poison they might contain. For is there, after all, any stationary meaning in the question? Perhaps, in reality, the Earth is both young and old. Young? If she is not young at present, perhaps she will be so in future. Old? If she is not old at this moment, perhaps she has been old, and has a fair chance of becoming so again. In fact, she is a Phoenix that is known to have secret processes for rebuilding herself out of her own ashes. Little doubt there is but she has seen many a birth-day, many a funeral night, and many a morning of resurrection. For, listen :-Where now the mightiest of oceans rolls in pacific beauty, once were anchored continents and boundless forests. Where the south pole now shuts her frozen gates inhospitably against the intrusions of flesh, once were probably accumulated the ribs of empires; man's imperial forehead, woman's roseate lips, gleamed upon ten thousand hills; and there were innumerable contributions to antarctic journals, almost as good (but not quite) as our own. Even within our domestic limits,—even where little England, in her south-eastern quarter, now devolves so quietly to the sea her sweet pastoral rivulets,—once came roaring down, in pomp of waters, a regal Ganges, that drained some hyper

1 Compare Milton's Latin poem "Naturam non pati Senium."

~M.

2 "Ganges":-Dr. Nichol calls it by this name for the purpose of expressing its grandeur; and certainly, in breadth, in diffusion at all times, but especially in the rainy season, the Ganges is the supreme

bolical continent, some Quinbus Flestrin of Asiatic proportions, long since gone to the dogs. All things pass away. Generations wax old as does a garment: but eternally God says:

-“Come again, ye children of men." Wildernesses of fruit, and worlds of flowers, are annually gathered in solitary South America to ancestral graves: yet still the Fauna of Earth, yet still the Flora of Earth, yet still the Sylva of Earth, does not become superannuated, but blossoms in everlasting youth. Not otherwise, by secular periods, known to us geologically as facts, though obscure as durations, Tellus herself, the planet, as a whole, is for ever working by golden balances of change and compensation of ruin and restoration. She recasts her glorious habitations in decomposing them; she lies down for death, which perhaps a thousand times she has suffered; she rises for a new birth, which perhaps for the thousandth time has glorified her disc. Hers is the wedding-garment, hers is the shroud, that eternally is being woven in the loom of palingenesis. And God imposes upon her the awful necessity of working for ever at her own grave, yet of listening for ever to his far-off trumpet of

resurrection.

If this account of the matter be just, and were it not treasonable to insinuate the possibility of an error against so great a swell as Immanuel Kant, one would be inclined to fancy that Mr. Kant had really been dozing a little on this occasion; or, agreeably to his own illustration elsewhere, that he had realised the pleasant picture of one learned doctor trying to milk a he-goat, whilst another doctor, equally learned, holds the milk-pail below.2 And there is

river in our British orient. Else, as regards the body of water discharged, the absolute payments made into the sea's exchequer, and the majesty of column riding downwards from the Himalaya, I believe that, since Sir Alexander Burnes's measurements, the Indus ranks foremost by a long chalk.

1 See Swift's "Gulliver." Quinbus Flestrin, we are there told, was the name in the Lilliputian language (meaning "man-mountain") for Gulliver.-M.

2 Kant applied this illustration to the case where one worshipful scholar proposes some impossible problem (as the squaring of the circle, or the perpetual motion) which another worshipful scholar sits down to solve. The reference was of course to Virgil's line-" Atque idem jungat vulpes, et mulgeat hircos."

apparently this two-edged embarrassment pressing upon the case-that, if our dear excellent mother the Earth could be persuaded to tell us her exact age in Julian years, still that would leave us all as much in the dark as ever: since, if the answer were "Why, children, at my next birth-day I shall count a matter of some million centuries," we should still be at a loss to value her age: would it mean that she was a mere chicken, or that she was "getting up in years"? On the other hand, if (declining to state any odious circumstantialities) she were to reply, "No matter, children, for my precise years, which are disagreeable remembrances; I confess generally to being a lady of a certain age,”—here, in the inverse order, given the valuation of the age, we should yet be at a loss for the absolute years numerically: would a "certain age" mean that " mamma was a million, or perhaps not much above seventy thousand?

Every way, you see, reader, there are difficulties. But two things used to strike me as unaccountably overlooked by Kant; who, to say the truth, was profound, yet at no time very agile, in the character of his understanding. First, what age now might we take our brother and sister planets to be? For this determination as to a point in their constitution will do something to illustrate our own. We are as good as they, I hope, any day; perhaps, in a growl, one might insinuate-better. It's not at all likely that there can be any great disproportion of age amongst children of the same household: and therefore, since Kant always countenanced the idea that Jupiter had not quite finished the upholstery of his extensive premises as a comfortable residence for man,-Jupiter having, perhaps, a fine family of mammoths, but in Kant's opinion as yet no family at all of 66 humans," ‚”—Kant was bound, ex analogo, to hold that any little precedency in the trade of living on the part of our own mother Earth could not count for much in the long run. At Newmarket or Doncaster the start is seldom mathematically true: trifling advantages will survive all human trials after abstract equity; and the logic of this case argues that any few thousands of years by which Tellus may have got ahead of Jupiter, such as the having finished her Roman Empire, finished her Crusades, and finished her French

Revolution, virtually amounts to little or nothing; indicates no higher proportion to the total scale upon which she has to run than the few tickings of a watch by which one horse at the start for the Leger is in advance of another. When checked in our chronology by each other, it transpires that, in effect, we are but executing the nice manœuvre of a start; and that the small matter of three or four thousand years, by which we may have advanced our own position beyond some of our planetary rivals, is but the outstretched neck of an uneasy horse at Doncaster. This is one of the data overlooked by Kant; and the less excusably overlooked because it was his own peculiar doctrine that uncle Jupiter ought to be considered a greenhorn. Suppose, then, that Jupiter is a younger brother of our mamma; yet, if he is a brother at all, he cannot be so very wide of our own chronology; and therefore the first datum overlooked by Kant was- -the analogy of our whole planetary system. A second datum, as it always occurred to myself, might reasonably enough be derived from the intellectual vigour of us men. If our mother could, with any show of reason, be considered an old decayed lady, snoring stentoriously in her arm-chair, there would naturally be some aroma of phthisis, or apoplexy, beginning to form about us, that are her children. But is there? If ever Dr. Johnson said a true word, it was in the reply which he made upon this question to the Scottish judge, Burnett, so well known to the world as Lord Monboddo. The judge, a learned man, but obstinate as a mule in certain prejudices, had said, querulously, "Ah, doctor, we are poor creatures, we men of the eighteenth century, by comparison with our forefathers!"—"Oh no, my lord," said Johnson, " we are quite as strong as our ancestors, and a great deal wiser." Yes; our kick is, to the full, as dangerous, and our logic does three times as much execution. This would be a complex topic to treat effectively; and I wish merely to indicate the opening which it offers for a most decisive order of arguments in such a controversy. If the Earth were on her last legs, we her children could not be very strong or healthy. Whereas, in almost every mode of intellectual power, we are a match for the most conceited of elder generations; and in some modes we have energies