globe, and that each day and year of life is measured by its revolutions There are few who believe that the great luminary of the firmament, whose restless activity they daily witness, is an immovable star, controlling, by its solid mass, the primary planets of our system, and forming, as it were, the gnomon of the great dial which measures the thread of life and the tenure of empires. Fewer still believe that each of the million of stars—those atoms of light which the telescope can scarcely descry—are the centres of planetary systems that may equal or surpass our own; and still smaller is the number who believe that the solid pavement of the globe upon which we nightly slumber is an elastic crist, imprisoning fires and forces which have often burst forth in tremendous energy, and are, at this very instant, struggling to escape-now finding an outlet in volcanic fires—now heaving and shaking the earth —now upraising islands and continents, and gathering strength perhaps for some final outburst which may shatter our earth in pieces, or change its form, or scatter its waters over the land. And yet these are truths than which there is nothing truer, and nothing more worthy of our study.
In order to learn, then, what is the constitution, and what has been or may be the probable history of the various worlds in our firmament, we must study the constitution and physical history of our own. The men of limited reason who believed that the earth was created and launched into its ethereal course when man was summoned to its occupation, must have either denied altogether the existence of our solar system, or have regarded all its planets as coeval with their own, and as but the ministers to its convenience. Science, however, has now corrected this error, and liberated the pious mind from its embarrassments. The Palæontologist—the student of ancient life—has demonstrated, by evidence not to be disputed, that the earth had been inhabited by animals and adorned with plants during immeasurable cycles of time antecedent to the creation of man—that when the volcano, the earthquake, and the flood, had destroyed and buried them, nobler forms of life were created to undergo the same fiery ordeal:—and that, by a series of successive creations and catastrophes, the earth was prepared for the residence of man, and the rich materials in its bosom elaborated for his use, and thrown within his grasp. In the age of our own globe, then, we see the age of its brother planets, and in the antiquity of our own system we see the antiquity of the other systems of the universe. In our catastrophes, too, we recognise theirs, and in our advancing knowledge and progressive civilization, we witness the development of the universal
