philosophers, for in these you have nearly the abstract amount of their opinions, and the sources of all modern infidelity. As for the cosmogonies of the Phœnicians, Egyptians and Babylonians, which derive the world from mechanical principles only, they are immediately introductive of atheism, as Eusebius of Cæsarea observes of Sanchoniatho, whose fragment he preserved, and Berosus of the Babylonian cosmogony, of which nation he himself was. To the doctrines of Orpheus the theologer I have no objection; with him your pupil will be safe. Hesiod is only fanciful. Of Thales the hylopathian, whose principle of things was water, I should doubt whether he was theist or atheist; but of his scholar Anaximander no doubt can be entertained; his system is professedly atheistical; the same principle descends and may be traced through Anaximenes, Anaxagoras and Diogenes of Apollonia, in a word, through all the masters of the Ionic school. Turn to Leucippus and Democritus, to Epicurus and all, who held the doctrine of atoms, what do you discover but the blindest ignorance and the grossest atheism? As for their celebrated physician Hippocrates, who, following the example of Hippasus and Heraclitus the obscure, held heat or fire to be immortal and omniscient, in one word God himself, I can only say it would have been safer to have taken his physic than his philosophy--but I have too long intruded on your patience, and forbear the rest. When Edward Wilson perceived that De Lancaster had done speaking, being unable to discover how this harangue could be brought into use for any present purpose, and conceiving himself not called upon to say that he would not put a pupil to read the Greek philosophers, who had not yet read the first leaf of his Latin grammar, he bowed and was silent. Philip sate with his hands upon his knees in the attitude of a hearer, and seemed employed upon a very close examination of his boots, as if in search of information from them; but they knew just as much, and no more, of the subject than he himself did.--I wonder why I was called in to hear all this, he said to himself, who know no more what he has been talking about than if he had expressed himself in the Hebrew language. The colonel on the contrary was under no reserve, but turning to De Lancaster, said, I cannot doubt, my good sir, but that all, which you have been saying, would be excellent advice to a student far advanced in his knowledge of the learned languages, but in the instance of my friend John I presume the time, when it can apply to him, lies yet at a considerable distance. You are right, replied De Lancaster, and therefore as I cannot expect to say it then, I take the liberty to say it now.