each other; that all particles of matter are governed by the same law,—­the great law of gravitation, by which “astronomy,” in the language of Whewell, “passed from boyhood to manhood, and by which law the great discoverer added more to the realm of science than any man before or since his day.”  And after Newton shall pass away, honored and lamented, and be buried with almost royal pomp in the vaults of Westminster, Halley and other mathematicians shall construct lunar tables, by which longitude shall be accurately measured on the pathless ocean.  Lagrange and Laplace shall apply the Newtonian theory to determine the secular inequalities of celestial motion; they shall weigh absolutely the amount of matter in the planets; they shall show how far their orbits deviate from circles; and they shall enumerate the cycles of changes detected in the circuit of the moon.  Clairaut shall remove the perplexity occasioned by the seeming discrepancy between the observed and computed motions of the moon’s perigee.  Halley shall demonstrate the importance of observations of the transit of Venus as the only certain way of obtaining the sun’s parallax, and hence the distance of the sun from the earth; he shall predict the return of that mysterious body which we call a comet.  Herschel shall construct a telescope which magnifies two thousand times, and add another planet to our system beyond the mighty orb of Saturn.  Romer shall estimate the velocity of light from the eclipses of Jupiter’s satellites.  Bessell shall pass the impassable gulf of space and measure the distance of some of the fixed stars, although such is the immeasurable space between the earth and those distant suns that the parallax of only about thirty has yet been discovered with our finest instruments,—­so boundless is the material universe, so vast are the distances, that light, travelling one hundred and sixty thousand miles with every pulsation of the blood, will not reach us from some of those remote worlds in one hundred thousand years.  So marvellous shall be the victories of science, that the perturbations of the planets in their courses shall reveal the existence of a new one more distant than Uranus, and Leverrier shall tell at what part of the heavens that star shall first be seen.

So far as we have discovered, the universe which we have observed with telescopic instruments has no limits that mortals can define, and in comparison with its magnitude our earth is less than a grain of sand, and is so old that no genius can calculate and no imagination can conceive when it had a beginning.  All that we know is, that suns exist at distances we cannot define.  But around what centre do they revolve?  Of what are they composed?  Are they inhabited by intelligent and immortal beings?  Do we know that they are not eternal, except from the divine declaration that there was a time when the Almighty fiat went forth for this grand creation?  Creation involves a creator; and can the order and