THE SOLAR SYSTEM IN A BLAZE. ±\ 



with that of the earth? And what is the substance of the 

 filmy comet that sweeps with such indecent haste through 

 the ranks of the dignified sisterhood of planets? In its 

 dazzling proximity to the sun at perihelion, it can only 

 exist as a fiery vapor, like the substance it seems to be. 

 And if we gaze across the cold and starless interval which 

 separates our firmament of stars from its nearest neighbors, 

 there we may witness a universe in its formative stage. 

 There, indeed, are firmaments so remote that the eye of 

 the telescope is strained in the attempt to descry the com- 

 ponent stars ; but nearer to our domestic earth than these 

 are the materials of firmaments which remain "rudis indi- 

 gestaque moles" — the " semina rerum" — the primordial ig- 

 neous vapor from which worlds are destined to be formed 

 in some far distant future age — so distant, probably, that 

 the career of terrestrial things will first have closed, and 

 mankind will have been ushered into another state of 

 being. Here are specimen creations, postponed to our age 

 in the lapse of eternity, to illustrate before our eyes the 

 infancy of the firmament which is garnished by the nightly 

 splendors of Sirius and Orion. As the gar-pike among an- 

 imal creations has been perpetuated to our day, to recite 

 the tale of his noble ancestry, so the Pentacrinus of the 

 Caribbean still lives to declare the history of pre-Adamite 

 creatures, whose mausoleum is a continent, and the ruins 

 of whose handiwork have risen in mountain piles. 



In our attempt to depict the history of this immensity 

 of flame, we draw upon the splendid deductions of Laplace, 

 endorsed by the genius of the elder Herschel, and first fore- 

 shadowed* by the genius of Leibnitz and Kant. There is 

 every reason to believe that the radiation of heat, which is 

 taking place from the earth and all the planets as well as 

 the sun himself in our own day, is a process which began 

 on the morning of the creation of matter. The rapid loss 



