66 COSMOS. 



cellular tissues of plants and animals ; the atmospheric ocean 

 with its waves and currents, through which pierce the forest- 

 crowned summits of our mountain chains. After this delinea- 

 tion of urely telluric relations, the eye would rise to the 

 celestial regions, and the Earth would then, as the well-known 

 seat of organic development, be considered as a planet, occu- 

 pying place in the series of those heavenly bodies which 

 circle round one of the innumerable host of self-luminous 

 stars. This succession of ideas indicates the course pursued 

 in the earliest stages of perceptive contemplation, and reminds 

 us of the ancient conception of the " sea-girt disc of earth," 

 supporting the vault of heaven. It begins to exercise its 

 action at the spot where it originated, and passes from the 

 consideration of the known to the unknown, of the near to the 

 distant. It corresponds with the method pursued in our 

 elementary works on astronomy, (and which is so admirable 

 in a mathematical point of view,) of proceeding from the 

 apparent to the real movements of the heavenly bodies. 



Another course of ideas must, however, be pursued in a 

 work, which proposes merely to give an exposition of what is 

 known of what may in the present state of our knowledge 

 be regarded as certain, or as merely probable in a greater or 

 lesser degree and does not enter into a consideration of the 

 proofs on which such results have been based. Here therefore 

 we do not proceed from the subjective point of view of human 

 interests. The terrestrial must be treated only as a part, 

 subject to the whole. The view of nature ought to be grand 

 and free, uninfluenced by motives of proximity, social sym- 

 pathy, or relative utility. A physical cosmography a picture 

 of 'he universe does not begin, therefore, with the terrestrial, 

 but with that which fills the regions of space. But as the 

 sphere of contemplation contracts in dimension our percep- 

 tion of the richness of individual parts, the fulness of phy- 

 sical phenomena, and of the heterogeneous properties of 

 matter becomes enlarged. From the regions in which we 

 recognise only the dominion of the laws of attraction, we 

 descend to our own planet, and to the intricate play of terres- 

 trial forces. The method here described for the delineation 

 of nature, is opposed to that which must be pursued in esta- 

 blishing conclusive results. The one enumerates what the 

 other demonstrates. 



