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a few words. A star of the 6th magnitude would require a 
period of 2,656 years for its light to reach our system; so that 
the star thus seen by the telescope is not necessarily as it now 
appears, but as it existed 2,656 years ago ; so that, supposing 
such a thing possible, if a telegraphic message had been sent 
off by light as the ageut, and therefore travelling at nearly 
twenty times the rate of our electric telegraph, to a star of the 
6th magnitude, at the date of the building of Rome, B.C. 753, 
it would have required twenty-eight years more of travel before 
it could have reached its destination. 
74. Stars situated in the more remote edges of the Milky 
Way require a period of 20,000 years for the transit of 
their light, according to the original calculations of Herschel , 
though these are now questioned ; and the splendid nebulae in 
Orion,* a portion of which has been proved by the spectroscope 
to be of a strictly nebulous or gaseous matter, and which was un- 
resolvable until the power of Lord Rosse’s gigantic telescope was 
brought to bear upon its beams, would absorb 60,000 years for the 
transit of its light to our system. And to proceed one step further, 
if, as Professor Nichol has finely contended, “we take the guidance 
of analogy, it may be asserted without hesitation, although not 
apart from a feeling next to overwhelming, relating to the 
awful realities within which our frail lives are passing — that if 
any of those Milky nebulte first seen by the six-feet mirror of 
Lord Rossers telescope, and left irresoluble until art shall achieve 
some new and mighty advance — if any of these are like the 
grand object in Orion, they may be so far off in space that light 
does not reach us from them in less than thirty millions of years l’ 3 
75. Thus far the science of astronomy confirms the teaching 
of Scripture relative to the antiquity of the heavens and the 
earth. And, so far from the next statement of Moses being in 
opposition to the discoveries of the younger and inferior science 
of geology, f it must be regarded as in complete accord with 
what geologists have at length found out; for, after the declara- 
* See “ Reply,” for remarks on the nebula; in Orion, 
f The science of Geology can scarcely be called a century old ; and the 
innumerable contradictions of its teachers have in a great measure reduced 
it to a series of conjectural speculations, at least compared with the logical 
demonstrations and masterly proofs belonging to the science of astronomy. 
Who questions the discoveries of Copernicus or Newton ? While, on the 
other hand, what geologist of note has not had occasion to modify his own 
views during his lifetime, as Sir Charles Lyell and others have frankly con- 
fessed ? The variations of geologists can only be described under the term 
“ Legion,” as a French author justly remarks : — “ Depuis l’epoque de Buffon, 
les systemes se sont eleves les uns a cote des autres en si grand nombre, qu’en 
1806, l’Institut de France comptait plus de quatre-vingts theories hostiles 
aux saintes flcritures ; Aucune n’est restee debout jusqu’a ce jour.” (La 
Bible et la Science moderne, par M. E. Panchaud, p. 13.) 
