ADDRESS. XXXIll 
however, for calling your attention to a few of those topics, within my own 
narrow sphere of study, which, from their prominence and general interest, 
may be entitled to your attention. 
I begin with Astronomy, a study which has made great progress under the 
patronage of this Association ; a subject, too, possessing a charm above all 
other subjects, and more connected than any with the deepest interests— 
past, present, and to come—of every rational being. It is upon a planet 
that we live and breathe. Its surface is the arena of our contentions, our 
pleasures, and our sorrows. [It is to obtain a portion of its alluvial crust 
that man wastes the flower of his days, and prostrates the energies of his 
mind, and risks the happiness of his soul; and it is over, or beneath, its 
verdant turf that his ashes are to be scattered, or his bones to be laid. It 
is from the interior, too—from the inner life of the earth, that man derives 
the materials of civilization—his coal, his iron, and his gold. And deeper 
still, as geologists have proved—and none with more power than the geolo- 
gists around me—we find in the bosom of the earth, written on blocks of 
marble, the history of primzval times, of worlds of life created, and worlds 
of life destroyed. We find there, in hieroglyphics as intelligible as those 
which Major Rawlinson has deciphered on the slabs of Nineveh, the remains 
of forests which waved in luxuriance over its plains—the very bones of huge 
reptiles that took shelter under their foliage, and of gigantic quadrupeds 
that trod uncontrolled its plains—the lawgivers and the executioners of that 
mysterious community with which it pleased the Almighty to people his 
infant world, But though man is but a recent occupant of the earth—an 
upstart in the vast chronology of animal life—his interest in the paradise 
so carefully prepared for him is not the less exciting and profound. For 
him it was made: he was to be the lord of the new creation, and to him 
it especially belongs to investigate the wonders it displays, and to learn the 
lesson which it reads. 
But, while our interests are thus closely connected with the surface and 
the interior of the earth, interests of a higher kind are associated with it as 
a body of the system tu which we belong. The object of geology is to 
unfold the history and explain the structure of a planet; and that history 
and that structure may, within certain limits, be the history and the structure 
of all the other planets of the system—perhaps of all the other planets of 
the universe. The laws of matter must be the same wherever matter is 
found. The heat which warms our globe radiates upon the most distant of 
the planets ; and the light which twinkles in the remotest star, is, in its phy- 
sical, and doubtless in its chemical properties, the same that cheers and 
enlivens our own system; and if men of ordinary capacity possessed that 
knowledge which is within their reach, and had that faith in science which 
its truths inspire, they would see in every planet around them, and in every 
- Star above them, the home of immortal natures—of beings that suffer and 
of beings that rejoice—of souls that are saved, and of souls that are lost. 
Geology is therefore the first chapter of astronomy. It describes that 
portion of the solar system which is nearest and dearest to us—the cosmo- 
politan observatory, so to speak, from which the astronomer is to survey the 
sidereal universe, where revolving worlds, and systems of worlds, summon 
him to investigate and adore. There, too, he obtains the great base line of 
the earth’s radius to measure the distances and magnitudes of the starry 
host, and thus to penetrate by the force of reason into those infinitely di- 
stant regions where the imagination dare not venture to follow him. But 
_ astronomy, though thus sprung from the earth, seeks and finds, like Astraa, 
1850. d 
