89 
The planets are next represented to emanate from these suns, and their 
moons and satellites to be derived from them. 
Gnomes! your bright forms, presiding at her birth, 
Clung in fond squadrons round the new-born Earth; 
When high in ether, with explosion dire, 
From the deep craters of his realms of fire. 
The whirling Sun this pond’rous planet hurl’d. 
And gave the astonish’d void another world. 
Gnomes! how you gaz’d! when from her wounded side 
Where now the South-Sea heaves its waste of tide, 
Rose on swift wheels the Moons refulgent car. 
Circling the solar orb, a sister star. 
The celebrated French Naturalist* represents the Deity as employing a 
Comet in the work of creation. 
This impinging with immense power on the dim, just as particles of fire 
are driven from a flint when struck by a steel, so those bodies which form 
are not certain that there are not more of them. Their number has received a great increase by the 
invention of telescopes: more perfect instruments, and more assiduous and accurate observers, may 
probably make some further addition to them. The satellite of Venus, of which there was a discovery 
made in the last century, and of the Georgium Sidus in the present, gives room for astronomers to 
expect a still greater augmentation of their number. 
The diameter of the great orbit, which our planet describes round the Sun, is more than sixty mil¬ 
lions of leagues, and this vast circumference vanishes into nothing, and becomes a mere point, when 
made use of by astronomers to measure the distance of the fixed stars. 
How great then must be the real bulk of those spotlike stars, that are perceivable by us at such an 
enormous distance! The sun is about a million times greater than the earth, and an hundred and ten 
times greater than all the planets put together. 
If the stars are suns , as their lustre gives us reason to suppose, how greatly must they surpass 
our earth in size! 
The stars, when seen through a telefcope, are innumerable: their sparkling affords a proof that 
they shine with their own light; and since they are visible to us at incomparably greater distances than 
Saturn, we may from thence infer that they are so many suns . Our sun, if viewed from a star, 
would itself appear like a star. There must then be an infinite number of suns; and to what purpose 
would they serve, if there were not Beings capable of enjoying the advantages of their light and heat? 
Is it not therefore natural to suppose, that they give light to other worlds, which their prodigious 
distance deprives us of, and possess also their several productions and inhabitants. How transcendent 
the idea, that these systems are all stored with Beings, created by a God, who wanted no fresh acces¬ 
sions to his happiness! 
Thus it is that night conveys to the mind a much grander conception of infinity than the day-time. 
In the glare of day I behold but one sun; but in the night I discern myriads. 
The light discovers to me only a terrestrial infinity, but the darkness discloses an infinity alto¬ 
gether celestial. 
Vide his Theory of the Earth, Vol. T. 
Z 
* Buffon. 
