It is remarkable, that in the first book, before the action of the Iliad begins, in regard to warlike matters, an incident is noticed concerning a pestilence; and the greatest importance is with reason attached to this incident. Pestilences are very frequently mentioned in the early periods of history, and Livy has scarcely a single book that does not advert to their recurrence. It seems accordingly to have been considered by Homer that no expedition, like the one fabulously supposed in the Iliad, could have been set on foot, and that the policy of the different nations of the world, which constantly comes into action in the poem, could not have been established as there imagined, till some means had been found sufficient to prevent or check the ravages occasioned by

that observed in forming, from the pictures in the moon, the various characters noticed in the four preceding volumes; for the male characters introduced in the pieces there explained, are almost invariably drawn from the shadows of the moon, and the female from her lights, these last resembling water encompassing land.

those pestilences. That happy end once obtained, and the condition of men improved by a circumstance so essential as general health, their views would soon be enlarged, the arts would spring into life, and all those results take place by degrees, to which navigation, commerce, war, and policy conduct. It may be observed accordingly, that the forces of the different powers engaged in the war of the Iliad, are not marshalled at the commencement of the poem, as they might naturally have been expected to be; but that the catalogue, in which they are so marshalled, is postponed to an account of the general cause and means of cure of the pestilence in question.

In a treatise upon that subject, which constituted one of those printed and given away some years since, as mentioned in the preface to the first volume, I had occasion to state, that the ancients were of opinion that the sands of which almost the whole of Africa is composed, had been brought down, in the lapse of ages, from the opposite coast of South America, by means of the currents of the vast rivers that flow there; and

that those sands had been originally cast up by the numerous volcanoes of America, (just as we have lately known them to be cast up for many successive days, upon the re-opening within this last year of the ancient volcano in the island of St. Vincent, called la Souffriere,) and further, that from thence it was that gold dust (the produce of America, and not of Africa,) had been in all ages found among the sands of Africa. In conformity with this statement it is observable, that Achilles, who, as will appear presently, represents Africa, says of the opposite continent of America, in speaking of it in II. 366, under the name of HεTION, (with reference to its everlasting past existence,)

Ωχομεθ' ες Θήβην, ιερήν πολιν Ηετίωνος

Την δε διεπραθομεντε και ηγομεν ενθαδε παντα,

that is, that it was all burned up with fire, (alluding to its volcanoes,) and that its ashes had been conveyed to his own country, Africa. The result of this, in the opinion of the ancients, was, that those vast rivers of America having their natural

boundary or stop either against the shores of the west side of Africa, (or in the Mediterranean Sea, by påssing through the Straits of Gibraltar,) communicated to those districts the seeds of pestilences; by reason that the sands or other matter, thrown up by the eruptions of the American volcanoes, being of a ferruginous nature, had the effect of making the waters in their neighbourhood brackish, and that those waters, originally stagnant for a time there, were afterwards conveyed to Europe and Africa, sometimes perhaps by the regular tides, at others, by a more irregular flood, and became the occasion of pestilences in those countries, as they had before been in the continent from whence they came.

* A supplement to one of the dissertations mentioned in the preface to the first volume, printed May 19, 1806, commences as follows, agreeing in substance with the statement above mentioned.

"The message of Mr. President Jefferson to the two houses of Congress, in America, dated 3rd December, 1805, has the following passage: 'In taking a view of the state of our country, we, in the first place, notice the

In conformity with these statements I apprehend the following lines, which purport to be an account

late affliction of two of our cities, under the fatal fever, which in latter times has occasionally visited our shores. Providence, in his goodness, gave it an early termination on this occasion, and lessened the number of victims which have usually fallen before it. In the course of the several visitations by this disease, it has appeared that it is strictly local, incident to cities and on the tide-waters only, incommunicable in the country, either by persons under the disease, or by goods carried from diseased places; that its access is with the autumn, and it disappears with the early frosts:' after which it proceeds to discuss the subject under a political and commercial view in respect to quarantines. Without examining this distinguished gentleman's statements, relative to the communication of infection, (which it would certainly be prudent to doubt,) I have much pleasure in observing that he has taken one step towards the conclusion which I drew in my former notes; though that step still appears somewhat short of the truth: for if the fever is caused by the tides simply, (as Mr. Jefferson seems to conclude,) the cause being constant and universal, the effect would be perpetual, and exist every where within their influence; whereas