The ninth plague of darkness he attributes to the prevalence of the worship of the sun, under the title of Osiris, Ammon, Orus, Isis, and the like. _Because_ the Egyptians, the Ethiopians, Persians, Phoenicians, Syrians, Rhodians, and various other nations, considered themselves Heliadae, or descendants of the sun. "What, then, can be more reasonable," continues our antiquary, "than for a people who thus abused their faculties, who raised to themselves a god of Day, their Osiris, and instead of that intellectual light, the wisdom of the Almighty, substituted a created and inanimate element as a just object of worship,--what could be more apposite than for people of this cast to be doomed to a judicial and temporary darkness?" Unfortunately, in the very next paragraph we are told that the Egyptians showed an equal reverence to night and darkness: obscurity, therefore, was only replacing one false god by another. They paid a religious regard to the _mugall_, a kind of mole, on account of its supposed blindness; and night was conceived more sacred than day, from its greater antiquity, since, according to the Phoenician theology, the wind _Copias_ and his wife _Baan_ were esteemed the same as night, and were the authors of the first beings. In the poems of Orpheus, Night is considered as the creative principle; and in the Orphic hymns we find Night invoked as "the parent of gods and men, and the origin of all things." This attempt to show an analogy between the crimes and sins of the Egyptians and the punishment they received, is too curious to be overlooked. The mania of seeking for the cause of every thing, reminds one of a singular character in Trinity College, Dublin, formerly well known, who invariably gave a reason for every direction he thought proper to issue; and he was once heard to address a servant in the following words: "Pat, put a cover upon that mutton. It is not for the purpose of keeping it hot, _because_ it is cold, but it is _because_ I do not wish the flies to get at it, _because_ fly-blown meat is both unpleasant to the taste and injurious to the health."