THE PLANETS, ARE THEY INHABITED 5 



subjection to him, there is a mutual fitness and adaptation 

 observable among a multitude of arrangements which cannot be 

 traced to, and which indeed obviously cannot arise from, any 

 general mechanical law by which the motions and changes of 

 mere material masses are governed. It is in these conveniences 

 and luxuries with which our dwelling has been so considerately 

 furnished, that we see the beneficent intentions of its Creator 

 more immediately manifested, than by any great physical or 

 mechanical laws, however imposing or important. If having a 

 due knowledge of our natural necessities of our appetites and 

 passions of our susceptibilities of pleasure and pain in fine, of 

 our physical organisation we were for the first time introduced 

 to this glorious earth with its balmy atmosphere its pure and 

 translucent waters the life and beauty of its animal and vege- 

 table kingdoms with its attraction upon the matter of our own 

 bodies just sufficient to give them the requisite stability, and 

 yet not so great as to deprive them of the power of free and 

 rapid motion with its intervals of light and darkness, giving an 

 alternation of labour and rest nicely corresponding with our 

 muscular powers with its grateful succession of seasons and its 

 moderate variations of temperature so justly suited to our 

 organisation : with all this fitness before us, could we hesitate to 

 infer that such a place must have been provided expressly for our 

 habitation ? 



7. If, then, the discoveries of science disclose to us in each 

 planet, which, like our own, rolls in regulated periods round the 

 sun, provisions in all respects similar if they are proved to be 

 similarly built, ventilated, warmed, illuminated, and furnished 

 supplied with the same alternations of light and darkness by the 

 same expedient with the same pleasant succession of seasons 

 the same diversity of climates the same agreeable distri- 

 bution of land and water can we doubt that such structures 

 have been provided as the abodes of beings in all respects re- 

 sembling ourselves ? The strong presumption raised by such 

 analogies is converted into a moral certainty, when it is shown 

 from arguments of irresistible force that such bodies are the 

 creation of the same Hand that raised the round world and 

 launched it into space. Such, then, is the nature of the evidence 

 which science offers on this interesting question. Let us 

 endeavour to strip it of such technical forms of language and 

 reasoning as are intelligible only to the scientific, and to present 

 it so as to be easily and agreeably comprehended. 



8. If we look at a plan of the solar system, but more especially 

 of that part of it to which we desire now more particularly to call 

 the attention of the reader, the first glance will impress us with 



4 



