or of war; and when we consider the length of time during which this accumulation may proceed, we cannot justly challenge the correctness of the conclusion that this earth is not to be the future residence of the numerous family which it has been destined The connexion between this probable truth and the doctrine of a plurality of worlds, will appear from the facts and reasonings in the following chapter.

to rear.

CHAPTER II.

DESCRIPTION OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM.

IN

N order to appreciate the force of the argument for a plurality of worlds, derived from the similarity of our Earth to the other planets of the Solar system, we must call the attention of the reader to a popular description of the magnitudes, distances, and general phenomena of the different bodies that compose it.

There is, perhaps, no sight in the material world more magnificent than that of the starry firmament. Seen from our earliest years, it may have ceased to excite our wonder, but no sooner has science taught us its true nature than it reappears in all its glory, like the gloomy landscape whose varied beauties a burst of sun-light has revealed. In the stillness of night, when the moral world is asleep,-when the aspen leaf has ceased to flutter, and no sound is heard save that of the remote waterfall, or the restless ocean, or the zephyr breath among the distant foliage, the silver Moon, the brilliant Planet, and

the twinkling Star, are the beacon-lights which guide the eye through the brilliant expanse above.

The orbs of heaven seem at first fixed and motionless, like the scene around, but ere long, before our survey or our reverie is over, we perceive that they have all been in motion. The Moon has neared the horizon one Planet has descended in the West,— another has risen from the Eastern sea, and every star in the sky has shared in the general movement. When the observer has discovered that he alone has moved,—that, night after night, the Moon and Planets have alone changed their place among the stars, and that the Earth on which he stands, and the planets, whose motion he has observed, form a system of their own, while the thousands of stars, among which they moved, are fixed at distances invariable, he has arrived at the leading truths in astronomy.

But to the contemplative mind, the firmament of stars and planets has a deeper interest. Everything around us, save it, is in a state of transition. Beside the fleeting changes which the return of the seasons brings, the landscape around us is every year changing its aspect. The heath is robbed of its purple, and the yellow harvest waves over its once russet breast. The forests of our youth have ceased

to give us shelter,-now the roof-trees of our homes, -now the floating bulwarks on the deep. The very places of our birth have been removed or effaced, and the lichen has encrusted the record on the tombstones of our fathers. All around is change,-but the gorgeous creations in the sky are still there, undimmed in brightness-unchanged in grandeur, -performing, with unflagging pace and unvarying precision, their daily, their annual, and their secular rounds. Upon these same heavens, just as we see them now, bespangled with the same planets and the same stars, our first parents gazed when they entered and when they quitted Paradise. The same constellations, Arcturus, Orion, and the Pleiades had sung together when the foundations of the world were laid,1 and they rolled in darkness over Calvary, when the Prince of Life was slain. They are truly the only objects in the universe which all nations have witnessed, and all people admired. They presided at the horoscope of our birth, and they will throw their pale radiance over the green mounds beneath which we are destined to lie.

Such are the associations with which we look at the firmament above, and deep must be the interest with which we contemplate the history and purpose

1 Job ix. 9.

of its mysterious forms. It was, doubtless, under such associations that the great Philosopher of Mind1 gave utterance to the feelings with which he contemplated the two cardinal phases of the physical and the moral world.

Methinks I ever tremble when I scan

The Starlit Heavens, the sense of Right in Man.

In surveying the material universe thus shadowed forth in the firmament, the first and the grandest object which arrests our attention is the glorious SUN, the centre and soul of the solar system,-the lamp that lights it, the fire that heats it,-the magnet that guides and controls it,—the fountain of colour which gives its azure to the sky, its verdure to the fields, its rainbow hues to the gay world of flowers, and the "purple light of love" to the marble cheek of youth and beauty. This globe, probably of burning gas, enveloping a solid nucleus, is 880,000 miles in diameter, above a hundred times that of our globe, and five hundred times larger in bulk than all the planets put together! It revolves upon its axis in twenty-five days, and throws off its light with the velocity of 192,000 miles in a second. Sometimes by the naked eye, but frequently even by small

1 Immanuel Kant.