214 
ASTRONOMY. 
less proportion to it than the smallest microscopic insect * 
does to the plant it lives upon; that this little, busy, in¬ 
quisitive creature, by the use of senses which were given 
to it for its domestic necessities, and by means of the as¬ 
sistance of those senses which it has had the art to procure, 
should have been enabled to observe the whole system of 
worlds to which its own belongs; the changes of place 
of the immense globes which compose it; and with such 
accuracy, as to mark out, beforehand, the situation in the 
heavens in which they will be found at any future point of 
time; and that these bodies, after sailing through regions 
of void and trackless space, should arrive at the place where 
they were expected, not within a minute, but within a few 
seconds of a minute, of the time prefixed and predicted: all 
this is wonderful, whether we refer our admiration to the 
constancy of the heavenly motions themselves, or to the 
perspicacity and precision with which they have been no¬ 
ticed by mankind. Nor is this the whole, nor indeed the 
chief part of what astronomy teaches. By bringing reason 
to bear upon observation, (the acutest reasoning upon the 
exactest observation) the astronomer has been able, out 
of the confusion (for such it is) under which the motions 
of the heavenly bodies present themselves to the eye of 
a mere gazer upon the skies, to elicit their order and their 
real paths. 
Our knowledge, therefore, of astronomy is admirable, 
though imperfect; and, amidst the confessed desiderata and 
desideranda which impede our investigation of the wisdom 
of the Deity, in these the grandest of his works, there are 
to be found, in the phenomena, ascertained circumstances 
and laws, sufficient to indicate an intellectual agency in 
three of its principal operations, viz. in choosing, in deter¬ 
mining, in regulating: in choosing, out of a boundless va¬ 
riety of suppositions which were equally possible, that 
which is beneficial; in determining, what, left to itself, had 
a thousand chances against conveniency, for one in its 
favor; in regidating subjects, as to quantity and degree, 
which, by their nature, were unlimited with respect to 
* Hooke describes a minute animalcule, which he discovered with a mi¬ 
croscope, upon a vine. From his data an estimate may be made of its 
bulk; but it is not so easy to fix upon any determinate quantity for the 
size of the plant. However, to put the case strongly, let the bulk of it 
be taken as equal to that of a cylinder one inch in diameter and a mile in 
length. Such a cylinder would contain above 345 cubic feet, and yet it 
would be many million times less when compared with the animalcule, 
than the earth is when compared with the bulk of a man.— Paxton. 
