those who inhabit the fertile fields of the temperate zone.  Yet if we attentively view this globe, will it not appear rather a place of punishment, than of delight?  And what misfortune! that those punishments should fall on the innocent, and its few delights be enjoyed by the most unworthy.  Famine, diseases, elementary convulsions, human feuds, dissensions, etc., are the produce of every climate; each climate produces besides, vices, and miseries peculiar to its latitude.  View the frigid sterility of the north, whose famished inhabitants hardly acquainted with the sun, live and fare worse than the bears they hunt:  and to which they are superior only in the faculty of speaking.  View the arctic and antarctic regions, those huge voids, where nothing lives; regions of eternal snow:  where winter in all his horrors has established his throne, and arrested every creative power of nature.  Will you call the miserable stragglers in these countries by the name of men?  Now contrast this frigid power of the north and south with that of the sun; examine the parched lands of the torrid zone, replete with sulphureous exhalations; view those countries of Asia subject to pestilential infections which lay nature waste; view this globe often convulsed both from within and without; pouring forth from several mouths, rivers of boiling matter, which are imperceptibly leaving immense subterranean graves, wherein millions will one day perish!  Look at the poisonous soil of the equator, at those putrid slimy tracks, teeming with horrid monsters, the enemies of the human race; look next at the sandy continent, scorched perhaps by the fatal approach of some ancient comet, now the abode of desolation.  Examine the rains, the convulsive storms of those climates, where masses of sulphur, bitumen, and electrical fire, combining their dreadful powers, are incessantly hovering and bursting over a globe threatened with dissolution.  On this little shell, how very few are the spots where man can live and flourish? even under those mild climates which seem to breathe peace and happiness, the poison of slavery, the fury of despotism, and the rage of superstition, are all combined against man!  There only the few live and rule, whilst the many starve and utter ineffectual complaints:  there, human nature appears more debased, perhaps than in the less favoured climates.  The fertile plains of Asia, the rich low lands of Egypt and of Diarbeck, the fruitful fields bordering on the Tigris and the Euphrates, the extensive country of the East Indies in all its separate districts; all these must to the geographical eye, seem as if intended for terrestrial paradises:  but though surrounded with the spontaneous riches of nature, though her kindest favours seem to be shed on those beautiful regions with the most profuse hand; yet there in general we find the most wretched people in the world.  Almost everywhere, liberty so natural to mankind is refused, or rather enjoyed but by their