300 Proceedings of the Boy at Physical Society. ' 



Our Society has still another function. It plays its part 

 as an exponent, through its reports in the daily press, of the 

 progress of Natural Science — a knowledge of which cannot 

 fail sooner or later to give a higher tone to the literature and 

 cast of thought in our country. It is painful to notice how 

 the writings of many of the most talented and accepted 

 authors of our day are entirely uninfluenced by the sublime 

 realities of Creation, — realities which excel in their grandeur 

 the most transcendent dreams of the imagination. The 

 poet who prates of " the pale cold moon/' and the " throb- 

 bing and pulsing stars," as the bashful witnesses of some 

 illicit love affair, entertains or feigns an infinitely more 

 degraded conception of his relation to the Universe in which 

 he is placed, than the child who lisps at evening, — 



" Twinkle, twinkle little star, 

 How I wonder what you are." 



For that wonder, which accompanies the little one in this 

 his first step towards the attainment of truth, will go hand 

 in hand with him, until in after years he may have sounded 

 all the known depths of the Cosmos. By-and-bye he looks 

 upwards to the Firmament in the night season with the 

 astronomer, and sees, in the luminous pathway which is 

 extended on high, an awful system of suns — a mist of suns 

 — of whose vast size and distance from each other, numbers 

 fail to impart to the human mind any conception. Each 

 shining particle of that dense sun-cloud, he is told, wonder- 

 ing, is separated from its neighbours by sixty millions of 

 millions of miles. He finds that one such particle alone has 

 been measured, weighed, and analysed ; — it is a vast globe 

 wrapped in a sea of the intensest flame, well-nigh 3,000,000 

 miles around ; — that this vast furnace, this infinitesmal par- 

 ticle of sun-mist, is slowly moving across the cloud of its 

 fellow suns ; yet though it should glance with the speed of 

 light for twenty thousands of years, its journey would still 

 be unaccomplished; — that this almost immeasurable Uni- 

 verse of suns is but a speck in a cloud of grander Universes 

 separated from each other by still more immeasurable wil- 

 dernesses of darkness extending into infinity for ever. 

 In those unfathomable abysses, he views the wheeling of 



