that confusion in which matter lay when newly produced out of nothing at the beginning of the world, before God, by his almighty word, had put it into the order and condition wherein it was after the six days creation. See Earth.

Chaos is represented by the ancients as the first principle, ovum, or seed of nature and the world. All the sophists, sages, naturalists, philosophers, theologues, and poets, held that chaos was the eldest and first principle, τὸ ἀρχαῖον κύβος. The Barbarians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Persians, &c. all refer the origin of the world to a rude, mixed, confused mass of matter. The Greeks, Orpheus, Hesiod, Menander, Aristophanes, Euripides, and the writers of the Cyclic Poems, all speak of the first chaos; the Ionic and Platonic philosophers build the world out of it. The Stoics hold, that as the world was first made of a chaos, it shall at last be reduced to a chaos; and that its periods and revolutions in the mean time are only transitions from one chaos to another. Lastly, the Latins, as Ennius, Varro, Ovid, Lucretius, Statius, &c. are all of the same CHAOS

same opinion. Nor is there any sect or nation whatever that does not derive their doctrines, the structure of the world, from a chaos.

The opinion first arose among the Barbarians, whence it spread to the Greeks and from the Greeks to the Romans and other nations. Dr Burnet observes, that besides Aristotle and a few other Pseudo-Platonists, nobody ever asserted that our world was always from eternity of the same nature, form, and structure, as at present; but that it had been the standing opinion of the wise men of all ages, that what we now call the terrestrial earth, was originally an unformed, indigestible mass of heterogeneous matter, called chaos; and no more than the rudiments and materials of the present world.

It does not appear who first breached the notion of a chaos. Moses, the eldest of all writers, derives the origin of this world from a confusion of matter, dark, void, deep, without form, which he calls tohu bohu; which is precisely the chaos of the Greek and Barbarian philosophers. Moses goes no further than the chaos, nor tells us whence it took its origin, or whence its confused state; and where Moses stops, there precisely do all the rest. Dr Burnet endeavours to show that as the ancient philosophers, &c., who wrote of the cosmogony, acknowledged a chaos for the principle of their world; so the divines, or writers of the theogony, derive the origin or generation of their fabled gods from the same principle.

Mr Whiston supposed the ancient chaos, the origin of our earth, to have been the atmosphere of a comet: which though new, yet all things considered, is not the most improbable assertion. He endeavours to make it out by many arguments, drawn from the agreement which appears to be between them. So that, according to him, every planet is a comet, formed into a regular and lasting constitution, and placed at a proper distance from the sun, revolving in a nearly circular orbit: and a comet is a planet either beginning to be destroyed or re-made; that is, a chaos or planet unformed or in its primeval state, and placed as yet in an orbit very eccentric.

in the phrase of Paracelsus, imports the air. It has also some other significations amongst the alchemists.

in Zoology, a genus of insects belonging to the order of vermes zoophyta. The body has no shell or covering, and is capable of reviving after being dead to appearance for a long time; it has no joints or external organs of sensation. There are five species, mostly obtained by infusions of different vegetables in water, and only discoverable by the microscope. See ANIMALCULE.