NATURE AND NATURAL HISTORY 



§ 

 The great movements of the Cosmos are on such 

 a scale that we note them not. The "sidereal universe 

 is as fluid and mobile as a meadow brook, but to 

 human experience it is as fixed as the everlasting 

 hills. The enormous speed of the revolving earth 

 registers itself to the eye very slowly in the rising 

 sun or moon, while the incredible speed of the stars 

 in their diverse orbits does not register itself to the 

 human eye at all; to our eyes they are fixed forever 

 in their places in the sky; as the earliest observers 

 beheld the constellations, so we behold them, and 

 so untold future generations will behold them, 

 though the separate bodies that are thus grouped 

 are rushing their several ways through space with 

 a velocity that nothing but light rivals. 



§ 

 Think of this huge globe as a living corpuscle in 

 the veins of the Infinite, gross and inert to our dull 

 senses, but vibrating and responding to influences 

 and forces that are too vast for us to take in. Behold 

 it floating through a sea of energy like a mote in the 

 air, or a corpuscle in the veins, as insignificant a part 

 of the Whole as the latter is of the human body, but 

 under the spell of the Whole, and a vital part of the 

 Whole. If we could draw far enough away from our 

 system we should see the sun surrounded by his 

 little family, filling a space in the heavens the size 

 of one's hatbrim, and other suns filling other little 

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