12S 



admit the conviction, that wherever we tread, it is on the 

 wrecks of former worlds. 



Thus we see how the profoundest enquiries become food 

 for the appetite of novelty. It cannot be satiated, any more 

 than the sense of vision, by terrestrial prospects. It expa- 

 tiates at large in the immensity of the heavens. It weighs 

 and measures the planets, their distance, and velocity ; and 

 ascertains with Newton, the laws that speed, yet confine 

 them in their orbits. It adds new powers to the eye by the 

 telescope, and opens to us deeper and deeper profundities of 

 space. We discover with Herschel, that the nebulous bright- 

 ness of the milky-way consists of multitudes of stars thickly 

 sown in stratum over stratum ; and which seem more closely to 

 approach each other in proportion to their remoteness from us 

 — that the stars of our firmament, however distant from each 

 other, are but a part of the one congeries — that our sun is an 

 individual among them, and that those in his vicinage naturally 

 appear to our eyes the farthest asunder. Prodigious contem- 

 plation ! — yet how trivial to that which succeeds. In various 

 parts of the heavens, and still more distant than the most 

 ' distant star of the galaxy, other nebulous spots appear. We 

 look through the telescope, and stars become visible as nu- 

 merous as those which heretofore constituted to us the uni- 

 verse. At the same time a profounder space is unfolded, and 

 other nebulae whose stars still remain undistino-uishable, are 

 revealed to view. Two thousand five hundred, has Herschel 

 numbered, of these Universes ; for Universes we must call 



