A GENERALIZATION. 4:1 



cations, 'm infinites than they do in infinitesimals. We may, 

 then, without crowding out any natural principle, or doing 

 violence to any just method of reasoning, reduce the scale of 

 the universe, in our imagination, to dimensions convenient to 

 be contemplated on all sides, and follow out our reasonings 

 with ease and comparative certainty respecting its properties, 

 forces, laws, internal arrangements, and progressive processes 

 of formation, from beginnings to ultimates. 



Considering, then, all general natural principles as applying 

 equally to greatest and to smallest analogous cosmical forms, 

 and to the whole universal structure as well as to its indi- 

 vidual parts, we proceed to another branch of the chain of 

 analogical reasoning, which will speedily conduct us to the 

 primal condition of the substance from which the material uni- 

 verse and all it contains, was organized. 



The nebular theory of planetary and solar formations, as 

 applying to our solar system, has been shown to rest on so 

 many probabilities as seemingly to justify the undoubting 

 conviction of its truth. But if this theory is admitted as ap- 

 plicable to our own solar system, its applicability to forma- 

 tions in the sidereal realms will, after the foregoing system of 

 universal analogies has been traced out, scarcely be disputed, 

 especially as it was in the sidereal realms that the first facts 

 were observed which seemed to intimate its truth. And if all 

 planetary and solar agglomerations originated from previously 

 diffused nebulous masses, then, in view of the unbroken chain 

 which, we have seen, binds all systems together as one system, 

 the following statement is its own sufficient proof: 



As the satellites were formed from the same original nebu- 

 lous mass from which the planets originated, so a prior state 

 of that mass was a state of unity and interdiffusion with the 

 mass which composed the sun. The materials of that mass, 



