10 COSMOS. 



I 



to his own local habitation, has further designated aa 

 Terrestrial Nature is the result of the silent co-operation 

 of a system of active forces, whose existence we can 

 only recognise by means of that which they move, blend 

 together, and again dissever ; and which they in part deve- 

 lope into organic tissues (living organisms), which have the 

 power of re-producing like structures. The appreciation of 

 nature is excited in' the susceptible mind of man through 

 the profound impression awakened by the manifestation of 

 these forces. Our attention is at first attracted by the re- 

 lations of size in space exhibited by our planet, which seems 

 only like a handful of conglomerated matter in the immea- 

 surable universe. A system of co-operating forces, which 

 either tend to combine or separate (through polar influences), 

 shows the dependence of every part of nature upon other 

 parts, both in the elementary processes (as in the formation 

 of inorganic substances), and in the production and main- 

 tenance of life. The size and form of the earth, its mass, 

 that is to say, the quantity of its material parts, which 

 when compared with the volume determines its density, and 

 by means of the latter, under certain conditions, both the 

 constitution of the interior of the earth and the amount of its 

 attraction, are relations which stand in a more manifest, and 

 a more mathematically demonstrable dependence upon one 

 another than we observe in the case of the above named vital 

 processes, in the distribution of heat, in the telluric condi- 

 tions of electro-magnetism, or in the chemical metamorphoses 

 of matter. Conditions, which we are not yet able to deter- 

 mine quantitatively on account of a complication of pheno- 

 mena, may nevertheless be present, and may be demon- 

 strated through inductive reasoning. 



Although the two kinds of attraction, namely, that which 

 acts at perceptible distances, as the force of gravity (the gra- 

 vitation of the celestial bodies towards one another), and 

 that which is manifested at immeasurably small distances, as 

 molecular or contact-attraction, cannot in the present con- 

 dition of science be reduced to one and the same law, yet it 

 is not on that account the less credible that capillary attrac- 

 tion and endosmosis, which is so important in reference to 

 the ascent of fluids, and in respect to animal and vegetable 

 physiology, may be quite as much affected by the force of gra- 



