Gulf of Manaar, and, having made great profit
by his trading, returned home.

The sixth voyage brought Sindbad to Serendib,
or Ceylon, and the seventh was again to
Serendib, whither he went as ambassador from
the Caliph. It is noticeable that Sindbad never
names more than two or three places in each
voyage—sometimes only one place, the destination
of his trade; and that the natural history
and commerce of the places named is always
rightly described. The countries which are the
scene of the most extravagant legends are not
named at all.

But what is extravagant in Sindbad's story?
Not exactly the tale of the roc. Marco Polo
speaks of an extraordinary bird in Madagascar,
"so large and strong as to seize an elephant with
its talons and lift it into the air." He says that
the Grand Khan sent inquirers into this tale,
who came back with one of the bird's feathers,
measuring ninety spans. We may forgive the
morsel of exaggeration when we hear what
modern naturalists tell of the gigantic eggs of
the epyornis.

Neither must we dismiss too hastily the story
of the valley of diamonds, for which good reason
can be furnished. The tale of the colossal
tortoise, also, can ride safely upon the broad
back of the Colossochelys Atlas, of which the
first fossil remains were discovered five-and-
twenty years ago.

THE END OF THE WORLD.

THERE are in every generation some
presumptuous men eager to expound the
inscrutable, and to read for us through their
narrow spectacles all that has been foreordained by
the Divine Wisdom. Their choice amusement is
the making an End of the World. They cannot
foretel whether their mutton will be burnt at
the next dinner time, but when the world will
be burnt up they tell us that they do know to a
year, and sometimes almost to an hour. They
wish to tell us the date of its end as distinctly as
the sage quoted by Chevreau in his History of
the World had calculated the beginning of it
to have been Friday, the sixth of September, at
four o'clock in the afternoon, a period which
he states in his French idiom to have been
"four hours after dinner." Some say that
the ending of the world will, and some say
that it will not, bring about the conversion oi
the Jews. The belief in the end of the world is
not Jewish and Christian only. A doctrine of
the final tumbling together of all things into
chaos was held by the old heathen philosopher;
and poets, taught by Empedocles and
Heraclitus, sung by Lucretius and Lucan. Seneca
wrote in a book of consolation, "When the time
comes, and the world, seeking renewal, is
destroyed, things will, by their own powers, wound
each other, the stars will strike together, and
when all matter is smoking with one fire, every
thing that now shines in its order will be
burnt up."

Many later writers have informed us of the
manner of the world's destruction. It is to be
taken to pieces, some have taught, in the order
in which, as a mechanism, it was put together;
the last things added being first removed. But
when the question of destroying all the stars
arises, then vain man, masquerading as a
prophet, has to discuss, and does boldly discuss, the
probability of all the worlds that fill the heavens
being inhabited like ours, and the chance their
inhabitants—if they have any—may run of
being destroyed with us for our sins.

Then, again, sections of speculators have
decided for themselves whether the world is to be
destroyed by natural agencies—as by fire from
its centre, or the stroke of a comet—or by means
wholly miraculous. The time to be occupied by
the destruction has been also variously settled.
Some know that it is a day; others have been
equally sure that as there were six days of
creation, so there will be also a gradual process
of destruction. Some have taught that while
all things upon earth were slowly decomposing
into their elements, the signs foretold by the
prophets would be happening. We are assured
now that the signs are happening, and we are
often told that men are not so large as they
once were.

It was an old Jewish doctrine that the world
would last six thousand years: two thousand
before the Law, two thousand under the Law,
and two thousand under the Gospel. In the
Christian Church there has been question
whether the heavens and earth were to pass
wholly away, or whether only all their evil was
to be destroyed out of them, and they were to
be renewed.

In our own day, fashionable expounders of the
secrets of the Most High dwell especially upon
the thousand years that are to come before the
end. Of Millenaries or Chiliasts there have been
three classes: those who look for a visible
reign of the Saviour during all those years, those
who expect a spiritual kingdom, those who
expect ten centuries of simply better days. The
founder of the spiritual school, whose doctrine
many of the early fathers taught, is said to have
been Papias, Bishop of Hierapolis, regarded as
a disciple of St. John. The expectants of a
material heavenly reign upon earth have their
opinion traced back to Cerinthus. The doctrine
of a substantial millennium was taught with
enthusiasm by the anabaptists, who, at the time
of the siege of Munster, circulated a book on
the reconstitution of the whole world. It has
been a doctrine widely held that men alive at the
beginning of this period (for which the last in
the list of would-be prophets has appointed the
year 1867) will remain alive, and that the martyrs
only will rise from their graves.

There was a time when the duration of the
world was thought to be bound up with that of
the Roman Empire. Then every comet, every
earthquake, was a terror. Hesychius, Bishop of
Salone, wrote, in the fourth century, to Saint
Augustine, asking him whether it was true that
the end of the world was near. Saint Augustine