20% ^-ATUHAL THEOLOGY. 



set off revolving upon any other than its shortest, or one ot 

 its longest axes, the poles on its surface would keep perpet- 

 ually changing, and it never would attain a permanent axis 

 of rotation. The effect of this unfixedness and instability 

 would be, that the equatorial parts of the earth might bo- 

 Dome the polar, or the polar the equatorial, to the utter 

 destruction of plants and animals which are not capable of 

 interchanging their situations, but are respectively adapted 

 to their own. As to ourselves, instead of rejoicing in our 

 temperate zone, and annually preparing for the moderate 

 vicissitude, or rather the agreeable succession of seasons 

 which we experience and expect, we might come to be lock- 

 ed up in the ice and darkness of the arctic circle, with bodies 

 neither inured to its rigors, nor provided with shelter or de- 

 fence against them. Nor would it be much better if the 

 trepidation of our pole, taking an opposite course, should 

 place us under the heats of a vertical sun. But if it would 

 fare so ill with the human inhabitant, who can live under 

 greater varieties of latitude than any other animal, still more 

 noxious would this translation of climate have proved to life 

 in the rest of the creation, and most perhaps of all in 

 plants. The habitable earth and its beautiful variety might 

 have been destroyed by a simple mischance in the axis oi 

 rotation 



(*) III. All this, however, proceeds upon a supposition 

 of the earth having been formed at first an oblate spheroid. 

 There is another supposition ; and perhaps our limited infor- 

 mation will not enable us to decide between them. The 

 second supposition is, that the earth, being a mixed mass 

 somewhat fluid, took, as it might do, its present form by the 

 joint action of the nmtual gravitation of its parts and its 

 rotatory motion. This, as Ave have said, is a point in the 

 history of the earth which our observations are not sufficient 

 to determine. For a very small depth below the surface, 

 but extremely small — less, perhaps, than an eight-thousandth 

 Dart, compared with the depth of the centre, we find vesti- 



