40 THE SIDEREAL UNIVERSE. 



these giddy flights, the imagination and conceptive powers 

 become lost and bewildered ; but so they do, in a great de- 

 gree, before we have traveled beyond the immediate neigh- 

 borhood of our own mundane sphere. The distance from the 

 earth to our own sun is measured by millions of miles ; and 

 even this, as one of the shortest of astronomical distances, the 

 imagination can but faintly conceive. The distance from the 

 sun to the stars is measured by millions of diameters of the 

 earth's orbit ; the distance from firmament to firmament is 

 measured by millions of interstellar spaces; the distance 

 even of the most interior firmament from the great Center of 

 all centers, may, in the efforts of the imagination, be measured 

 by millions, or even billions of inter-firmamental spaces ; and 

 the circumference of the whole Grand Structure, may even 

 transcend all human conceptions of infinitude; yet form, 

 locality, relative position, center, circumference, and hence 

 limits, must exist as absolutely as they exist in the smallest 

 spherule of matter visible to the human eye ; and to the view 

 of an absolutely infinite Being, the whole Universe of uni- 

 verses may be of comparative dimensions not greater than a 

 single grain of sand ! And if Ehrenberg could, by the aid of 

 the microscope, descry a whole animal kingdom in a single 

 drop of water, each individual of the myriads of whose ani- 

 mated forms must have had eyes, teeth, stomach, intestines, 

 and all the appurtenances of a complete anatomical structure, 

 governed by unvarying physiological laws; and if by the 

 same means he could demonstrate that a particular geological 

 deposit, fourteen feet thick and miles in extent, was made up 

 almost exclusively of the skeletons of animals, forty-one bil- 

 lions of which could exist in a single cubic inch, then we may 

 rest assured that the principles of nature exist in no greater 

 completeness, and in no higher or more inconceivable compli- 



