_
which the architect spreads over his flat roofs, or on the tops of his
sloping terraces, afterwards to be covered with soil and laid out into
gardens. Such, it seems, was that portion of the framework of our great
globe which corresponded to the hollow lath and plaster framework of the
little globes used in schools; while its uppermost layer,--correspondent
with the slips of the map which the geographer pastes on the model and
then varnishes,--was formed of earth and water, economically laid out
into "most useful and tasteful configurations,"--the earth into pretty
little rising grounds and valleys, and the water into seas and lakes of
no great extent, but which formed, from their very handsome
combinations, "a terraqueous surface all over PERFECTLY PARADISAICAL."
Over this exquisitely neat earth there lay an enveloping atmosphere,
greatly thinner and less dense than the air at present is, and
incapable, in consequence, of being agitated by storms; while directly
over the northern and southern extremities of the world the polar
auroras, now so fitful and broken, extended in a permanent arch, and
gave light, during the long dark winters, to the regions lying below.
And as warmth was as necessary to the paradisaical perfection of these
districts as light, they received the necessary heat from the great
double-acting furnace in the interior, which, belching out flames at
both ends, acted powerfully against the polar portions of the metallic
crust or shell, and thus maintained the necessary glow in the absence of
the sun, on the principle on which a frying-pan or Scotch _girdle_ is
heated when placed by the cookmaid over the fire. And such, according to
this excellent world-fashioner and very zealous man, was the
construction of that unblighted and unbroken earth which was of old
pronounced to be "very good." The Fall, however, produced a most
remarkable and singularly disastrous change. The earth was somehow
partially crushed and broken, contemporaneously with the event,--like a
strong fishing basket when it accidentally falls from a coach-top under
the wheel; and, from a most interesting colored copperplate that
illustrates one of the author's treatises (for he draws as well as he
writes), the exact damage which it received can be minutely estimated.
The interior network was compressed into all sorts of irregular
polygons; the iron firmament was broken into great fragments,--some of
which may be seen in the print hanging