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 know ledge very rare and curious, and much to be desired,

Book First.

CONTAINING DIVERS INGENIOUS THEORIES AND PHILOSOPHIC SPECULATIONS CONCERNING THE CREATION AND POPULATION OF THE WORLD, AS CONNECTED WITH THE HISTORY OF NEW-YORK,

CHAPTER I.

Description of the World,

It

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. 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 the year, viz. spring, summer, autumn, and winter.

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.

the companion of the ambassador of God. He has written a universal history, entitled " Mouroudge-ed-dhahrab, or, the Golden Meadows, and the mines of precious Stones," In this valuable work he has related the history of the world, from the creation down to the moment of writing; which was under the Khaliphat of Mothi Billah, in the month Dgioumadi-el-aoual of the 336th year of the Hegira or flight of the Prophet. He informs us that the earth is a huge bird, Mecca and Medina constitute the head, Persia and India the right wing, the land of Gog the left wing, and Africa the tail. He informs us, moreover, that an earth has existed before the present, (which he considers as a mere chicken of 7000 years,) that it has undergone divers deluges, and that, according to the opinion of some well-informed Brahmins of his acquaintance, it will be renovated every seventy thousandth hazarouam; each hazarouam consisting of 12,000 years.

These are a few of the many contradictory opinions of philosophers concerning the earth, and we find that the learned have had equal perplexity as to the nature of the sun. Some of the ancient philosophers have affirmed that it is a vast wheel of brilliant fire; † others, that it is merely a mirror or sphere of transparent crystal; and a third class, at the head of whom stands Anaxagoras, maintained that it was nothing but a huge ignited mass of iron or stone-indeed, he declared the heavens to be merely a vault of stone, and that the stars were stones whirled upwards from the earth, and set on fire by the velocity of its revolutions.§ But I give little attention to the doctrines

MSS. Bibliot. Roi. Fr.

+ Plut. de Plac. Philos. lib. ii. cap. 20.

Achill. Tat. Isag. cap. 19. Ap. Petav. t. iii. p. 81. Stob. Eclog. Phys. lib. i. p. 56. Plut. de. Plac. Philos.

§ Diogenes Laertius in Anaxag. 1. ii, sec. 8. Plat. Apol. t. i. p. 26. Plut. de Plac. Philos. Xenoph. Mem. 1. iv. p. 815.