VOL. XXI.J PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. 431 



pass 100 fathom in a second of time, would spend in passing those spaces : 

 whence he concludes it would be 25 years passing to the sun from the earth, 

 125 from Jupiter, and 250 from Saturn. Then he proceeds to consider the 

 body of the sun, where he is nonplused, as about the moon ; for he is not sa- 

 tisfied whether it be a solid or fluid body, but he inclines to think it a fluid. 

 Next, he knows not what to think of animals or vegetables in it, since there 

 can be nothing like any thing we know, by reason of the continual fire and heat 

 which would consume all such as we have here. He thinks therefore it might 

 be made for the illuminating and enlivening of the parts of the other planets. 

 And as for the fixed stars, he conceives them to be so many suns, and to be dis- 

 persed in the vast expanse of heaven, at various distances, and each of them to 

 have a proper system, and planets moved about them. And though it be im- 

 possible for us ever to see those planets, by reason of their vast distance, yet 

 from the analogy that is between the sun and stars, we may judge of the pla- 

 netary systems about them, and of the planets themselves, which probably are 

 like the planetary bodies about the sun, that is, that tliey have plants and 

 animals, as great admirers and observers of the heavens as any on the earth. 

 This represents to us a wonderful scheme of the prodigious vastness of the 

 heavens, so that the distance between the earth and the sun, though of 

 17000000 of German miles, is almost nothing to the distance of a fixed star. 

 And because of the difficulty in making observations for this purpose, in the 

 common ways, he therefore proposes a new method of his own for this pur- 

 pose, which he also explains, and by that one may the better conceive the vast- 

 ness of the distance of one of the nearest, as for instance from the sun, which 

 by this way he proves to be 27604 times the distance of the sun from the earth, 

 and to make this distance yet more comprehensible, he makes use of the former 

 explication, by the time that a cannon bullet moved as swift as has been just 

 now explained. Wherefore multiplying 27664 by 25, he finds that a cannon 

 bullet moving 100 fathoms in a second would be 7OOOOO years in its journey 

 between us and the fixed stars. Here by the way he makes some reflections on 

 Descartes' Vortices, and explains his own sentiments concerning the present 

 state of the universe. Nor will he trouble his mind about their beginning, or 

 how made, as knowing it to be out of the reach of human knowledge or con- 

 jecture. 



Orang Outang, she Homo Sylvestris; or, the Anatomy of a Pigmy, compared 

 Willi that of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Alan. To hich is added a Philological 

 Essay concerning the Pigmies, the Cynocephali, the Satyrs and Sphinxes of the 

 Ancients, ^c. By Edward Tyson, M.D.F.R.S. London, 4Lo. 1699. 

 N°236, p. 3 38. 



