Till from the defunct carcase, lo!
Starts a full blooded Bond street beau!!
In mimic earthquakes, rain, and thunder!
Chymistry furnishes us with a method of manufacturing artificial earthquakes, which will have all the great effects of those that are natural. The old-fashioned receipt for an earthquake, however, of iron filings and sulphur mixed in certain proportions and immersed in the earth, I shall not take the trouble to state to your worships; as most of you have, perhaps, read Mr Martin’s Philosophy nearly half through. But my plan is to make such an earthquake as no mortal, except Dr Darwin and myself, ever supposed possible. The former gentleman made shift to explode the moon from the southern hemisphere of our earth, and I propose to forward other moons by artificial earthquakes of my own invention, from the northern hemisphere. I will give your worships a specimen of Dr Darwin’s moon-producing earthquake, from “Botanic Garden,” Canto I.
“Gnomes! How you shriek’d! when through the troubled air,
Roar’d the fierce din of elemental war;
When rose the continents, and sunk the main,
And earth’s huge sphere exploding burst in twain.—
Gnomes! How you gazed! When from her wounded side,