66 SCENERY IN A PATCH 



When we reflect upon these facts, and remember that the 

 faint nebulous clusters are far more remote from tfie dis- 

 tinct stars than they from us that the light which man- 

 ifests their presence now may have left its source when the 

 Tudor, Norman, or Saxon race occupied the throne of Eng- 

 land we catch a glimpse of the immensity of space, and of 

 the infinity of that being who originated the great govern- 

 ment of which it is the scene. 



We have nothing to guide us respecting the magnitude of 

 the stars beyond their visibility, when so vastly remote. 

 The planet Saturn is magnified by the telescope larger than 

 the moon to the naked eye, though 900 millions of miles 

 distant ; but instrumental power fails in giving an appre- 

 ciable magnitude to the stars. It brings countless multi- 

 tudes into view hid from the unassisted sight ; it makes us 

 sensible of their presence ; it increases their brilliancy : but 

 beyond this, it supplies us with no information respecting 

 their volume and mass. Halley remarked, that " the diani- 

 ters of Spica Yirginis and Aldebaran are so small, that when 

 they happen to immerge behind the dark edge of the moon, 

 they are so far from losing their light gradually, as they 

 must do if they were of any sensible magnitude, that they 

 vanish at once with all their lustre, and emerge likewise in 

 a moment, not small at first, but at once appear with their 

 full light, even although the emersion happen when very 

 near the cusp, where, if they were ' four seconds in diameter/ 

 they would be many seconds of time in getting entirely sep- 

 arated from the limb. But the contrary appears to all 

 those who have observed the occultations of those bright 

 stars." The largest and most brilliant of the stars, if oc- 

 culted at the dark limb of the moon, Sir John Herschel ob- 

 serves, "is, as it were, extinguished in mid-air, without 

 notice or visible cause for its disappearance, which, as it 

 happens instantaneously, and without the slightest previous 

 diminution of its light, is always surprising ; and if the star 



