IMMENSITY OF CREATION. 85 



masses which were resolvable into stars by his telescope. 

 He, however, computed that his large telescope would follow 

 one of those large clusters, as a general mass, if plunged so 

 deep into space that its light would require three hundred 

 and fifty thousand years to reach us ; and, it is thought that 

 the great telescope of Lord Ross would pursue the same 

 object to ten times that distance, or _a distance which light, 

 with its inconceivable velocity of motion, would consume 

 more than three millions of years in traversing!* This, 

 therefore, may be assumed as the proximate distance of the 

 remotest nebulae rendered- visible by Lord Ross's instrument. 

 If, as is probable, all stellar creations, included in a sphere 

 bounded on all sides by this enormous distance, constitute 

 only a small fraction of a segment of one such circle of 

 creations as we have supposed to surround the great common. 

 Center of attraction, it would not be advisable for the reader 

 to attempt to conceive of the dimensions even of one of those 

 whole circles, much less of the whole universe ; which latter, 

 however, if created, must be inferior to the Creator, and thus 

 finite. 



But, applying the same general laws to the creation of the 

 solar, and the creation of the universal, system, it may be 

 asked, " Why is it that either the unitary agglomeration repre- 

 sented by single planets, or the multiplied segregated division 

 which we have supposed to be represented by nebulas and 

 stellar clusters, did not take place uniformly in both systems 

 as the formation from the materials of the nebulous rings ?" 

 The answer, I apprehend, may be found in the different condi- 

 tions of the rings in the two systems, as involved in their 

 different magnitudes. In the great system of systems, the dis- 



* See Mitchell's "Planetary and Stellar World," p. 23&-T. 



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