NATURAL THEOLOGY. 45 



some hours in getting half a yard from a star which 

 it touched. A motion so deUberate we may think 

 easily guided. But what is the fact ? The moon, 

 in fact, is, all this while, driving through the hea- 

 vens at the rate of considerably more than two 

 thousand miles in an hour ; which is more than 

 double that with which a ball is shot off from the 

 mouth of a cannon. Yet is this prodigious rapidity 

 as much under government, as if the planet pro- 

 ceeded ever so slowly, or were conducted in its 

 course inch by inch. It is also difficult to bring the 

 imagination to conceive (what yet, to judge tolera- 

 bly of the matter, is necessary to conceive,) how 

 Zoose, if we may so express it ; the heavenly bodies 

 are. Enormous globes, held by nothing, confined 

 by nothing, are turned into free and boundless 

 space, each to seek its course by the virtue of an 

 invisible principle ; but a principle, one, common, 

 and the same in all, and ascertainable. To pre- 



and 1607, — has a mean distance from the sun of 1,705 miUions 

 of miles, the earth's mean distance being 96,000,000 ; but while 

 the earth's orbit is so nearly circular that the planet's greatest 

 distance is only a thirtieth part more than its smallest, this comet's 

 aphelion (or greatest) distance is above 3,355 millions, and its 

 perihehon (or least) distance only 55 millions, or sixty-one times 

 less. So the transverse (or longer) axis of its orbit is four times 

 the .length of the conjugate (or shorter) axis; whereas the two 

 axes of the earth's orbit differ by only a 7,000th part from one an- 

 other. Most of the planetary orbits are nearly circular also, — 

 . tlmt of Pallas being the most elongated, and in the proportion of 

 only 5 to 3. But the orbits of the comets have every variety of 

 shape as well as size, and their motion the greatest difference in 

 velocity ; yet they appear all to follow the same general laws, — - 

 and these the same by which the planetary motions are governed, 



