14 



discovered, — it will then be high time to meditate on the best 

 plan of rendering it serviceable to ourselves, and available to 

 science ; and objectors on this score must please to recollect that 

 the calculations for eclipses, and other important astronomical 

 phenomena, experienced any thing but delay or difficulty from 

 Newton's development of the true solar system. Be the system 

 of nature discovered when it may, it will never be found that 

 Appia Via which Linnaeus has made it out to be, but rather like 

 the Cretan labyrinth, and whoever may happen to be the fortu- 

 nate Theseus, must undertake the task of showing the way to 

 his competitors, until it becomes so well known, that a map of the 

 road* may be drawn for the use of all. 



It being then incontrovertibly established, that nature pos- 

 sesses, on the grand scale, two tendencies ; one, the formation 

 of globes or circles, the other, the disposition of inferior creations 

 to cluster round superior ones, is it too great a presumption to 

 imagine tendencies thus exhibited in the creation and government 

 of worlds, as in some degree typical of the design from wliich 

 universal nature has been modelled ? Is there the least violation 

 of probability in supposing the great and beneficent Creator the 

 centre of His works, and from the centre pervading and uphold- 

 ing His wonderful and stupendous creation ? And again, may 

 not minor centres typify those beings on whom He has been 

 pleased to bestow a marked superiority over those around them ? 

 Such an one is man, of whom it is said, " In His own image 

 created he lum."-!" 



I will suppose them a system composed of an immense multi- 

 tude of material beings, organic and inorganic, animate and inani- 

 mate, revolving in circles around the central, everlasting abode of 

 that Providence who created, pervades, and upholds them, and 

 can, by the act of His will, either annihilate or create anew, — a 

 supposition much more readily admitted than rejected ; and, 

 although not positively proved, yet incapable of disjjroof fi"om 

 man's researches. I will further suppose the minor circles occa- 

 sionally clustering round major ones ; yet I am still in want of 

 some number by which to allot to these circles their respective 



* A systematic catalogue. f Genesis i. 27. 



