ASTRONOMY. 217 



Our ignorance, moreover, of the sensitive natures, by 

 which other planets are inhabited, necessarily keeps from 

 us the knowledge of numberless utilities, relations, and 

 subserviencies, which we perceive upon our own globe. 



After all ; the real subject of admiration is, that we un- 

 derstand so much of astronomy as we do. That an animal 

 confined to the surface of one of the planets, bearing a 

 less proportion to it, than the smallest microscopic insect* 

 does to the plant it lives upon ; that this little, busy, in- 

 quisitive creature, by the use of senses which were given 

 to it for its domestic necessities, and by means of the as- 

 sistance of those senses which it has had the art to procure, 

 should have been enabled to observe the whole system of 

 worlds to which its own belongs ; the changes of place 

 of the immense globe, which compose it ; and with such 

 accuracy, as to mark out, before -hand, the situation in the 

 heavens in which they will be found in any future point of 

 time ; and that these bodies, after sailing through regions 

 of void and trackless space, should arrive at the place where 

 they were expected, not within a minute, but within a few 

 seconds of a minute, of the time prefixed and predicted ; all 

 this is wonderful, whether we refer our admiration to the 

 constancy of the heavenly motions themselves, or to thQ 

 perspicacity and precision with which they have been non 

 ticed by mankind. Nor is this the whole, nor indeed the 

 chief part, of what astronomy teaches. By bringing reason 

 to bear upon observation, (the acutest reasoning upon the 

 exactest observation,) the astronomer has been able, out 

 of the confusion, (for such it is) under which the motions 

 of the heavenly bodies present themselves to the eye of a 

 mere gazer upon the skies, to elicit their order and their 

 real paths. 



Our knowledge therefore of astronomy is admirable, 

 though imperfect ; and, amidst the confessed desiderata 

 and desideranda, which impede our investigation of the 

 wisdom of the Deity, in these the grandest of his works, 

 there are to be found, in the phenomena, ascertained cir^ 



* Hooke describes a minute animalcule, which he discovered with 

 a microscope, upon the vine. From his data an estimate may be 

 made of its bulk ; but it is not so easy to fix upon any determinate 

 quantity for the size of tlie plant. However, to put the case strongly, 

 let the bulk of it be taken as equal to that of a cylinder one inch in 

 diameter, and a mile in length. Such a cylinder would contain above 

 345 cubic feet, and yet it would be many million times less, when 

 compared with the animalcule, than the earth is whgn compared with 

 the bulk of a man, Faxton, 



