the general burning of a city or other considerable place.

The word is commonly applied to that grand period or catastrophe of our world when the face of nature is to be changed by fire, as it formerly was by water. The ancient Pythagoreans, Platonists, Epicureans, and Stoics appear to have had a notion of the conflagration, though whence they derived it, unless from the sacred books, it is difficult to conceive, except perhaps it were from the Physicians, who themselves had it from the Jews. Seneca says expressly, *Tempus advenit quo sidera siderebus incurrent, et omni flagrante materia uno igne, quicquid nunc ex deposito lucet, ardabit.* This general dissolution the Stoics call *exequiae.* Mention of the conflagration is also made in the books of the Sibyls, in Sophocles, Hystaspes, Ovid, Lucan, and others. Dr Burnet, after Tachard and others, relates that the Siamese believe that the earth will at last be parched up with heat, the mountains melted down, and the earth's whole surface reduced to a level, and then consumed with fire; and the Brahmins of Siam not only hold that the world shall be destroyed by fire, but also that a new earth shall be made out of the cinders of the old.

Various are the sentiments of authors on the subject of the conflagration, the cause whence it is to arise, and the effects which it is to produce. Divines ordinarily account for it metaphysically, and will have it take its rise from a miracle, as fire from heaven. Philosophers contend for its being produced from natural causes, and will have it effected according to the laws of mechanics. Some think an eruption of the central fire sufficient for the purpose, and add, that this may be occasioned in several ways, either by having its intensity increased, which again may be effected by its being driven into less space by the encroachments of the superficial cold, or by an increase of the inflammability of the fuel by which it is fed, or by having the resistance of the imprisoning earth weakened, which may happen either from the diminution of its matter, by the consumption of its central parts, or by weakening the cohesion of the constituent part of the mass by excess or defect of moisture. Others look for the cause of the conflagration in the atmosphere, and suppose that some of the meteors there engendered in unusual quantities, and exploded with unusual vehemence, from the concurrence of various circumstances, may effect it, without seeking any further. The astrologers account for it from a conjunction of all the planets in the sign Cancer, as the deluge, according to them, was occasioned by their conjunction in Capricorn. Lastly, others have recourse to a still more effectual and flaming machine, and conclude that the world is to undergo conflagration from the near approach of a comet in its return from the sun.