thrones in Europe. Our four eldest royal children will all be rulers or wives of rulers: and the Denmark family has precisely the same prospect. If Popes and Kings will drive the world to count their years and watch their health, they must not mind hearing the fact that they are old and sickly. If the Czar is seldom sober, he must expect all Europe to see and say how hopeless, with that aggravation, is the prospect for himself and his people,—and for his victims, the Poles. On the other hand, the young candidates for thrones must understand how imperative is the call upon them for diligent study and thoughtful contemplation, in proportion to the capacity of each for moral and political wisdom.
No one of them, however, is so likely as persons of a different order to feel the impressiveness of a lot cast as ours is,—on the verge of the disclosure of a new period of society, and a new age of human life. If we long to know how men felt and behaved when Christianity was expelling paganism, or when the representative principle was discrediting feudal modes of living, we ought to be awake to the fact that we also are witnessing the preparation for a new social age in the existence of ideas, of knowledge, of desires and anticipations, which we do not know how to use and apply. It is a serious position: our times are very solemn: we believe, on the whole, that society is advancing; yet we witness turmoils and barbarities that shake our very souls within us. Let us watch; let us account for what we can, and hope for what we may,—steady and confident in hopefulness from the certainty that there can be no extensive lapse into barbarism while knowledge and philosophy are advancing. The brutes and ruffians, high and low, are always a handful in comparison with the kindly quiet people who pass through life in a spirit of love and peace: and from these broad seedfields of good, great harvests will be growing when the fetid political swamps of all autocracies, spurious or corrupted, and all despotisms disguised as republics, are drained away into the black sea of the past.
The “Saturday Reviewer” has led us very far. It was Gibbon, however, who made the road: and we can hardly have wasted our time in trying to get some views from it.
ARE THE PLANETS INHABITED?
Few questions can be started more curious or more interesting than that which relates to the existence or non-existence of life on the other planets of our solar system. Arguments on both sides have been urged with more or less ability; the negative being chiefly based on the assumption that they are unfitted, for physical reasons, to be the home of beings organised as we are. Though there is in reality no reason why living beings differently organised to ourselves should not inhabit those worlds, we propose to show that an inhabitant of the planet we occupy, might, if transported hence to one of them, be capable of continued existence there with just that slight modification which would grow out of a change of condition. As their adaptability for habitation must depend to a great extent on the matter of which they are composed, it is worth while stating the hypothesis which we conceive to be the most plausible as to the mode in which they were formed—an hypothesis, be it here remarked, which agrees, on the whole, with the opinions maintained by Sir D. Brewster and other high authorities.
The idea that the sun is an incandescent mass, seems to be confirmed by the recent experiments of Kirchoff, Bunsen, and others; and very wonderful indeed are the inferences which flow from their discoveries. We know that the sun revolves on its axis in a certain period, and appearances indicate that the same results follow from this in his case, as regards the regular set of currents of air, as on the earth. The larger and brighter masses of cloud are heaped together more thickly on either side of a band running across the sun’s disc than elsewhere, owing, as is supposed, to currents analogous to our trade winds. They are also observed to collect round the huge dark spots so frequently visible on the sun’s disc. The cause of these spots cannot be explained, but when numerous they do certainly affect the amount of light transmitted to us, as the experiments of Secchi show the light emitted from a spot near the centre of the sun does not exceed in quantity that which flows from the edge of the disc, where the luminosity is least, and from whence it goes on increasing towards the centre. But these masses of cloud are far from being of the innocent nature of those which float in our atmosphere. Instead of being particles of water, they are, there is good reason to believe, formed of metallic vapours, which, if they descend at all, pour down on the body of the sun in a fiery shower with a force, compared with which our tropical rains are light as falling dew. The mass of which the sun is composed is so enormous that the mind cannot form the faintest conception of the period which must elapse before its fires are extinguished and it disappears from the firmament, as other luminaries have done before it. Nor would it be possible, even if its combustion were more rapid than it is, to perceive any diminution in its dimensions, though the most careful observations were continued through successive generations. But that which generations could not perceive may well have taken place for all that, and it is easy to imagine that there was a time when in a nebulous state it filled the whole space included within the orbit of Neptune. Its revolution on its axis would cause the denser particles of which it was composed to fly outwards, and a ring would be formed which, by the dissipation of heat in space would probably contract and fracture, and the fractured portions may then have coalesced and assumed the form of a globe, retained in its orbit by the attraction of the mass of matter from which it had separated, and rotating on its axis in the same way as its constituent particles had done when it formed part of the parent body, or it may be that this continuous rotation may be due, as has been asserted, to the effects of electricity; a theory which was promulgated some years since in this country, though it has recently been