astronomy, geography, and the principal phenomena of nature, being brought before youth within a very small compass.
2. This abstract of the solar system might be followed by a compendious View of Geography on the same plan, that of comprising every particular in concise but luminous sentences. In this part it would be proper to describe Europe particularly, because of its importance in the present slate of the world; and Britain might with propriety be allowed to occupy, in the compendium, that pre-eminence among the nations which the God of providence has given her.
3. To these might be added a number of popular truths and facts relative to Natural Philosophy. In the present improved state of knowledge a thousand things have been ascertained relative to light, heat, air, water, to meteorology, mineralogy, chemistry, and natural history, of which the ancients had but a partial knowledge, and of which the natives of the east have as yet scarcely the faintest idea. These facts, now so clearly ascertained, would be conveyed in a very short compass of language, although the process of reasoning which enables the mind to account for them, occupies many volumes. A knowledge of the facts themselves however, would be almost invaluable to the Hindoos, as these facts would rectify and enlarge their ideas of the various objects of nature around them, and while they, in general, delighted as well as informed those who read them, they might inflame a few minds of a superior order with an unquenchable desire to know why these things are so, and thus urge them to those studies which in Europe have led to the discovery of these important facts.
4. To this view of the solar system, of the earth, and the various objects it contains, might with great advantage be added such a
