300 Proceedings of the Boyal 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 
