Note 28 — CANTO I. OURSELF!
Reading edition
In mimic earthquakes, rain, and thunder!
Chymistry furnishes us with a method of manufacturing artificial earthquakes, which will have all the great effects of those that are natural. The old-fashioned receipt for an earthquake, however, of iron filings and sulphur mixed in certain proportions and immersed in the earth, I shall not take the trouble to state to your worships; as most of you have, perhaps, read Mr Martin’s Philosophy nearly half through. But my plan is to make such an earthquake as no mortal, except Dr Darwin and myself, ever supposed possible. The former gentleman made shift to explode the moon from the southern hemisphere of our earth, and I propose to forward other moons by artificial earthquakes of my own invention, from the northern hemisphere. I will give your worships a specimen of Dr Darwin’s moon-producing earthquake, from “Botanic Garden,” Canto I.
“Gnomes! How you shriek’d! when through the troubled air, Roar’d the fierce din of elemental war; When rose the continents, and sunk the main, And earth’s huge sphere exploding burst in twain.— Gnomes! How you gazed! When from her wounded side, Where now the South sea heaves its waste of tide, Rose on swift wheels the Moon’s refulgent car, Circling the solar orb, a sister star, Dimpled with vales, with shining hills emboss’d, And roll’d round earth her airless realms of frost.”
No man will say in this case,—
Parturiunt montes nascetur ridiculus mus.
The reaction, at the moment of explosion, of that mass of matter which now composes our moon, is the cause of the obliquity of the polar axis to the poles of the ecliptic, according to Dr Darwin; though Milton says,
“—————Angels turn’d askance The poles of earth twice ten degrees and more: From the sun’s axle, they with labor push’d Oblique the centric globe.”—
Whether an explosion similar to that, so beautifully described by Dr Darwin, from the north side of the equator, would not set all right, and a new era be announced, which will be, like that of old, when
“——————Spring Perpetual smiled on earth, with vernal flowers, Equal in days and nights”——
is a problem worth the attention of our modern philosophers. But at any rate, I, Dr Caustic, will positively try the experiment.