Art. III.— VASTNESS OF CREATION. 



"We extract tlic following from the Hon. Edward Everett's oratioa, 

 at the dedication of the Dudley Observatory, in Albany, New York: 



" But it is when we turn our observations and our thoughts from 

 our own system, to the systems which lie beyond it in the heavenly 

 spaces, that we approach a more adequate conception of the vastness 

 of creation. All analogy teaches us that the sun which gives light 

 to us, is but one of those countless stellar fires which deck the fir- 

 mament, and that every glittering star in that shining host, is the 

 center of a system as vast, and as full of subordinate luminaries as 

 our own. Of the'se suns, centers of planetary systems, thousands 

 are visible to the naked eye, and millions are discovered by the tel- 

 escope. Sir John Hershell, in the account of his operations at the 

 Cape of Good Hope, (p. 381,) calculates that about five and a half 

 million of stars are visible enough to be distinctly counted in a 

 twenty foot reflector in both hemispheres! He adds, ' that the actual 

 number is much greater, there can be little doubt.' His illustrious 

 father estimated on one occasion, that one hundred and twenty-five 

 thousand stars passed through the field of his forty feet reflector in 

 a quarter of an hour. This would give twelve millions for the entire 

 circuit of the heavens in a single telescopic zone ; and this estimate 

 was made under the assumption that the nebulae were masses of lu- 

 minous matter not yet condensed into suns. 



These stupenduous calculations, however, form but the first column 

 of the inventory of the universe. Faint white specks are visible 

 even to the naked eye of a practical observer, in diff'erent parts of 

 the heavens. Under high magnifying powers, several thousand of 

 such spots are visible ; no longer, however, faint white specks, but 

 many of them resolved by powerful telescopes into vast aggregations 

 of stars, each of which may, with propriety, be compared with the 

 Milky Way. Many of these nebulae, however, resisted the power of 

 Sir WiELiAM Hershell's great reflector, and were accordingly still 

 regarded by him as masses of unformed matter, not yet condensed in- 

 to suns. This, till a few years since, was, perhaps, the prevailing 

 opinion ; and the nebular theory filled a large space in modern as- 

 tronomical science. But with the increase of instrumental power, 

 especially under the mighty grasp of Rosse's gigantic reflector, and 



