Ch. xxiii. 6.

• Would he contend with me in the greatness of his
strength?

No, surely he hath put in me permanent existence.'

The ellipsis, however, is not necessary: nor can x, he be allowed in this place, to imply permanent existence as a noun governed of the verb. The exact rendering is,

Would he contend with me in the mightiness of power?

No-rather would he concede to me.

, has the sense of conceding or granting in various passages. See amongst others Gen. xlv. 7. 1 Sam. ii. 20. Ch. xxviii. 3, 4. (The miner) feels in the dark,

And all around he seeks
For the stones of darkness,

And the shadow of death.

A flood breaks in upon the forgotten inhabitants,
It is drained by the foot, it is removed by man.'

We cannot account for this division of the first verse into hemistichs. As to the translation itself, the learned editor tells us,

• This can never stand without a very forced construction, making Pp, extremity, or end to signify the extremity of the hand; wyp, extremitates posuit, felt round about. I rather think Miss SMITH wrote frets, for in her manuscript the real word is hardly distinguishable,) in the sense that Rachael uses it nap, I am weary of my life: so in this place, there the miner wearies himself in the dark. One can only say, that this is as good as He putteth an end to

darkness.

Of two bad versions we will not pretend to say which is the worst. The direct rendering is,

One (or man) worketh out a place in the gloom;

Yea, to the utmost scope he scrutinizeth;

The stones of darkness and death-shade.

V. 17. She shall not be compared with gold and glass,
Nor balanced with vessels of pure gold.'

.רתמררתר.

Nor balanced' has rather a ludicrous turn; and is neither grammatically or etymologically the meaning of The former line is thus justified by the fair translator in a subjoined note. Glass was very scarce in the time of Job, and of course very valuable. It is supposed to have been first made on the coast of Palestine.' The name of the archaiologist who thus supposeth is unfortunately not mentioned: and Dr. Randolph has been too discreet to betray the secret.

Ch. xxx. 4. They cropped the helimus on the bush,

And the root of the genista was their bread.'

Helimus we suppose should be halimus (anos); but as,

after all, we do not distinctly know the exact kind of plant the translator intended, either by this or by genista, which last is sometimes rendered broom, and sometimes green-wood) we must, with the unlearned, content ourselves for the present, with the vulgar reading of "mallows" and "juniper-roots" and the learned we must refer to the following note of the editor upon this passage.

רהם and מלת Vid. Parkhurst on .

The latter word, however, being used in Psalm cxx. 4. to express a shrub, which served for fuel

6

, with hot burning coals. Ralbag, in allusion to this very passage, (and perhaps justly,) gives a far different interpreion; They take the root of the juniper on to warm themselves; making ↳ a preposition.'

Ch. xxxiv. 14. • If he set his heart upon it,

He can recall his spirit and his breath.'

him.

A most elegant and correct rendering for what is equally inelegant and incorrect in our common version : "f he set his heart upon man, if he gather unto himself his spirit and his breath." The latter if is not in the original, and instead of upon man, it is x, ad id, or ad eum, upon it, or upon Ch. xxxv. 19. • Who giveth imaginations in the night.' We completely agree with the judicious editor in thinking that, This does not give a better sense than that of our present version, who giveth songs: nor indeed can it be reconciled with the Hebrew, unless the root be chan ed into D, which I rather suspect, from inadvertence, to have been the case.'

Ch. xxxviii. 41. And are famishing for want of food.'

Correct and perspicuous. ', is not here derived from nyn to wander, as in our common version, but from yns 'to break down, comminute, or wear away.' So the Chaldee, Arabic, and Syriac, infirmantur. We only prefer, with the bible-version, the present tense, to the future, which is here substituted throughout the verse.

Ch. xxxix. 30.

Her young ones swallow blood.'
Our common version is preferable.

"Her young ones also suck up blood." Here again we have to remark Miss Smith's omission of 1, also, or and at the beginning of the line. Dr. Stock renders the passage, i

· AND her

young ones GOBBLE UP blood.'

Ch. xl. 2. Doth he who contends with the Almighty draw back?' Our standard text gives "Shall be that contendeth with the Almighty instruct him?" Dr. Stock,

"Will he that contendeth with the Almighty lay down his plea ?" The original is as follows,

literally,

הרב על שרי יסור

Doth it, then, edify to contend with the Almighty?' And thus nearly Pagninus,

potente, eruditio?"

V. 6, 7.

66

num quid contendere cum omni

And Jehovah spake to Job from the whirlwind and said, Bind now like a strong man thy loins."

In Ch. xxii. 1. the term here rendered "from the whirlwind," is there given "out of the storm:" and in V. 3. the expression bind now, is gird up now,

Ch. xl. 17: He bendeth his tail like a cedar.'

The remainder of the verse is rendered as in our common ver. sion. We refer to it because we are surprized that Miss Smith did not, on various accounts, give it its true and more read-able sense, which would then have been,

The sinews of his haunches are braced together. The original which, in its present situation, has puzzled so many of our commentators, is distinctly an Arabic term

coxa femora, "the haunches, or hind-quarters." Whence the passage is thus rendered in the Syriac and Arabic versions," erecti sunt nervi coXARUM ejus." Nor is there the smallest authority for translating verenda, or testes, as all the old Latin interpreters have it, or as it is given, from the Latin copies, in our common lection. This is still more obvious, from the term being altogether omitted in most, if not in all, the Greek versions, as of no importance: the usual rendering amongst them being νευρα αυτου (Οι αυτου σκοινια) συμπεπλεκται, "his sinews are braced together."

We conclude, as we at first observed, and our readers. will probably conclude with us, upon an attentive perusal of the foregoing remarks, that the translation we have examined, does not answer the general call which has so long been made for a correct translation of the book of Job. It gives us a very high opinion of the literary talents of the lamented and very excellent author: and might perhaps, had her life been spared, have satisfied that demand, after repeated revisions and corrections. But, in its present state, it can only be regarded as the sketch of a great and good mind, which has left it to labour, however, for want of such revisions, under a heavy load of errors and misconceptions.

Art. III. Ferguson's Astronomy, explained upon Sir. Isaac Newton's Principles. With Notes, and Supplementary Chapters, by David Brewster, LL. D. Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and of the Society of the Antiquaries of Scotland. 2 vols. 8vo. with a quarto volume of plates. pp. xi. 1002. Price 11. 16s. Edinburgh, Oliphant and Balfour. London, Murray, 1811.

THE republication of a treatise of established reputation and regular sale, by any other than the actual proprietors of the original work, their heirs, or assigns, is so unusual among booksellers of honour and respectability, that it naturally excites inquiry and reflection. The instance before us is the second, in which a Scotch editor and Scotch booksellers have reprinted a book of Ferguson's, soon after the genuine proprietors had laid before the public a new edition. The twelfth edition of Ferguson's Astronomy was published under the superintendence of the late Dr. Mackay, but shortly before his death; a circumstance which, it might have been apprehended, would have dissuaded any other bookseller, or any other editor from printing the same work in the same or any other shape, for some years to come. This, however, is not the case. According to the existing laws relative to literary property, the procedure of the Scotch booksellers is legal-though we must be permitted to say it is so far from liberal, that we question if a dozen booksellers could be found on either side of the Tweed, who would "offend in like sort." The conduct of the editor excites surprize of another kind. That a man who possessed neither learning, talents, industry, nor genius, should gladly avail himself of an opportunity of causing his name to be remembered, during the twenty or thirty years to come that Ferguson's name shall be preserved from oblivion, by placing both upon one title-page, is natural enough. But that Dr. Brewster, who possesses all those requisites in a tenfold degree higher than Ferguson himself, should be induced by any motives to become a partner in his fame, an improver, or a preserver of his works, is to us perfectly astonishing. There are no points of contact between the two, except in the knack at popular illustration: but even here, there is this essential difference-that Ferguson dealt in popular illustration because he had nothing else to dispense, while Dr. Brewster whenever he has recourse to it, does it to the neglect of invention and investigation, for which he is equally well fitted. Ferguson was an inventive mechanist, a popular lecturer, and, so far as a very avaricious person could be, a worthy man; but he was not a philosopher-nor even a mathematician. Far from being able to write upon astronomy according to Sir Isaac Newton's principles, he could not comprehend one of them; nor

could he demonstrate the simplest proposition in Euclid's Elements. He could gaze at, and roughly sketch, the grand outlines of the solar system; but he could no more enter into the developement of the minutia than an infant. He was incapable of tracing the grand laws of the celestial world through a hundredth part of their modifications; and he was equally incapable of travelling through many of the intricacies of calculation. Such, however, is the man with whom Dr. Brewster condescends to connect his name; his are the works which Dr. Brewster has chosen as hinges on which to suspend his acquirements, his speculations, and his fame and thus it happens, that no country milk-maid with linsey-woolsey petticoat, fringed with spangles and decked with diamonds, could present a more outré and ridiculous appearance, than the volumes which the present Editor has given to the world.

Our readers will judge from this, that we consider most of Dr. Brewster's supplementary chapters as rather valuable in themselves,-but as likely to be rendered less valuable by being "out of place," and some of them by separation from equally curious matter, which was withheld only

because it was too abstruse to be of the least service to those who could derive profit from Ferguson's book. We do not complain because he has written on astronomy; but because he has only poured light indistinctly upon remote and detached regions, when he might have been well, and, as we believe, successfully employed, in presenting a luminous prospect of the whole of this interesting department of science.

The supplementary chapters are in number 12; and relate to the following subjects. The five new planets,-the new discoveries in Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn,new discoveries respecting the body of the sun, and its motion in free space,-new discoveries and phenomena in the moon, with tables of lunar spots, lunar mountains, &c.-eclipses,— occultations, transits of Venus and Mercury over the sun's disc,-aberration of the heavenly bodies-precession of the equinoxes,-nutation of the earth's axes, and the variation in the obliquity of the ecliptic,-comets, with tables of the elements of 98 which had been observed previously to the year 1808,-fixed stars, their magnitude, distance, parallax, proper motion, &c.,-speculations on the origin of the four new planets, and of meteoric stones,-and a tabular view of the solar systein. These occupy 382 pages of the second volume, and will be found to comprize much interesting and curious information. The following particulars, though they cannot but be well known to the readers of La Place,