l9vS NA1UE.AL THEOLO(iY. 



things close to us ; the change apphes immediately to oui 

 sensations : of all the phenomena of nature, it is the mo;-t 

 obvious and the most familiar to our experience ; but, in its 

 cause, it belongs to the great motions which are passing in 

 the heavens. While the earth glides round her axle, she 

 ministers to the alternate necessities of the animals dwelling 

 upon her surface, at the same time that she obeys the influ- 

 ence of those attractions which regulate the order of many 

 thousand worlds. The -relation, therefore, of sleep to night 

 is the relation of the inhabitants of the earth to the rotation 

 of their globe ; probably it is more : it is a relation to thb 

 system of which that globe is a part ; and still further, to 

 the congregation of systems of which theirs is only one. If 

 this account be true, it connects the meanest individual with 

 the universe itself — a chicken roosting upon its perch, with 

 the spheres revolving in the firmament. 



VIII. But if any one object to our representation, that 

 the succession of day and night, or the rotation of the earth 

 upon which it depends, is not resolvable into central attrac- 

 tion, we will refer him to that which certainly is — to the 

 change of the seasons. Now the constitution of animals 

 susceptible of torpor bears a relation to winter, similar to 

 that which sleep bears to night. Against not only the cold, 

 but the want of food, which the approach of winter induces, 

 the Preserver of the world has provided in many animals by 

 migration, in many others by torpor. As one example out 

 of a thousand, the bat, if it did not sleep through the win- 

 ter, must have starved, as the moths and flying insects 

 upon which it feeds disappear. But the transition from 

 Eummer to winter carries us into the very midst of physical 

 asJronomy; that is to say, into the midst of those laws 

 which govern the solar system at least, and probably all thfi 

 heavenly bodies. 



