ing away the chaff of hypothesis, and discarding the tares of fable, which are too apt to spring up and choke the seeds of truth and wholesome knowledge. Had I been anxious to captivate the superficial throng, who skim like swallows over the surface of literature; or had I been anxious to commend my writings to the pampered palates of literary epicures—I might have availed myself of the obscurity that overshadows the infant years of our city, to introduce a thousand pleasing fictions. But I have scrupulously discarded many a pithy tale and marvellous adventure, whereby the drowsy air of summer indolence might be enthralled; jealously maintaining that fidelity, gravity, and dignity, which should ever distinguish the historian. "For a writer of this class," observes an elegant critic, “must sustain the character of a wise man, writing for the instruction of posterity: one who has studied to inform himself well, who has pondered his subject with care, and addresses himself to our judgment, rather than to our imagination.”

Thrice happy, therefore, is this our renowned city, in having incidents worthy of swelling the theme of history; and doubly thrice happy is it in having such a historian as myself, to relate them. For after all, gentle reader, cities of themselves, and in fact, empires of themselves, are nothing without an historian. It is the patient narrator who records their prosperity as they rise who blazons forth the splendour of their noontide meridian-who props their feeble memorials as they totter to decay who gathers together their scattered fragments as they rot-and who piously at length collects their ashes into the mausoleum of his work, and rears a triumphal monument to transmit their renown to all succeeding ages.

What has been the fate of many fair cities of antiquity, whose nameless ruins encumber the plains of Europe and Asia, and awaken the fruitless inquiry of the traveller?--they have

sunk into dust and silence--they have perished from remembrance for want of a historian! The philanthropist may weep over their desolation--the poet may wander among their mouldering arches and broken columns, and indulge the visionary flights of his fancy-but alas! alas! the modern historian, whose pen, like my own, is doomed to confine itself to dull matter of fact, seeks in vain among their oblivious remains, for some memorial that may tell the instructive tale, of their glory and their ruin.

"Wars, conflagrations, deluges," says Aristotle, "destroy nations, and with them all their monuments, their discoveries, and their vanities.-The torch of science has more than once been extinguished and rekindled-a few individuals, who have escaped by accident, reunite the thread of generations."

The same sad misfortune which has happened to so many ancient cities, will happen again, and from the same sad cause, to nine-tenths of those which now flourish on the face of the globe. With most of them the time for recording their history is gone by; their origin, their foundation, together with the early stages of their settlement, are forever buried in the rubbish of years; and the same would have been the case with this fair portion of the earth, if I had not snatched it from obscurity in the very nick of time, at the moment that those matters herein recorded, were about entering into the widespread insatiable maw of oblivion-if I had not dragged them out, as it were, by the very locks, just as the monster's adamantine fangs were closing upon them for ever! And here have I, as before observed, carefully collected, collated, and arranged them, scrip and scrap, "punt en punt, gat en gal," and commenced in this little work, a history to serve as a foundation, on which other historians may hereafter raise a noble superstructure, swelling in process of time, until Knickerbocker's

New-York may be equally voluminous, with Gibbon's Rome, or Hume and Smollett's England!

And now indulge me for a moment: while I lay down my pen, skip to some little eminence at the distance of two or three hundred years a-head; and, casting a bird's eye glance over the waste of years that is to roll between, discover myself-little I at this moment the progenitor, prototype, and precursor of them all, posted at the head of this host of literary worthies, with my book under my arm, and New-York on my back, pressing forward like a gallant commander, to honour and immortality!

Such are the vain glorious imaginings that will now and then enter into the brain of the author-that irradiate, as with celestial light, his solitary chamber, cheering his weary spirits, and animating him to persevere in his labours. And I have freely given utterance to these rhapsodies whenever they have occurred; not, I trust, from an unusual spirit of egotism, but merely that the reader may for once have an idea, how an author thinks and feels while he is writing--a kind of knowledge very rare and curious, and much to be desired,

T.

Book First.

CONTAINING DIVERS INGENIOUS THEORIES AND PHILOSO

AND

PHIC SPECULATIONS CONCERNING THE CREATIONA POPULATION OF THE WOrld, as connECTED WITH THE HISTORY OF NEW-YORK.

CHAPTER Į,

Description of the World,

ACCORDING to the best authorities, the world in which we dwell is a huge, opaque, reflecting, inanimate mass, floating in the vast ethereal ocean of infinite space. It has the form of an orange, being an oblate spheroid, curiously flattened at opposite parts, for the insertion of two imaginary poles, which are supposed to penetrate and unite at the centre; thus forming an axis on which the mighty orange turns with a regular diurnal revolution.

The transitions of light and darkness, whence proceed the alternations of day and night, are produced by this diurnal revolution successively presenting the different parts of the earth to the rays of the sun. The latter is, according to the best, that is to say, the latest accounts, a luminous or fiery body, of a prodigious magnitude, from which this world is driven by a centrifugal or repelling power, and to which it is drawn by a centripetal or attractive force; otherwise called the attraction of gravitaA

tion; the combination, or rather the counteraction of these two opposing impulses producing a circular and annual revolution. Hence result the different seasons of viz. spring, summer, autumn, and winter.

the year,

This I believe to be the most approved modern theory on the subject—though there be many philosophers who have entertained very different opinions; some too of them, entitled to much deference from their great antiquity and illustrious characters. Thus it was advanced by some of the ancient sages, that the earth was an extended plain, supported by vast pillars; and by others, that it rested on the head of a snake, or the back of a huge tortoisebut as they did not provide a resting place for either the pillars or the tortoise, the whole theory fell to the ground, for want of proper foundation.

The Brahmins assert, that the heavens rest upon the earth, and the sun and moon swim therein like fishes in the water, moving from east to west by day, and gliding along the edge of the horizon to their original stations during the night; while, according to the Pauranicas of India, it is a vast plain, encircled by seven oceans of milk, nectar, and other delicious liquids; that it is studded with seven mountains, and ornamented in the centre by a mountainous rock of burnished gold; and that a great dragon occasionally swallows up the moon, which accounts for the phenomena of lunar eclipses. +

Besides these, and many other equally sage opinions, we have the profound conjectures of ABOUL-HASSANALY, son of Al Khan, son of Aly, son of Abderrahman, son of Abdallah, son of Masoud-el-Hadheli, who is commonly called MASOUDI, and surnamed Cothbeddin, but who takes the humble title of Lahebar-rasoul, which means

* Faria y Souza, Mick. Lus. note b. 7.

+ Sir W. Jones, Diss. Antiq. Ind. Zod.