to edge nearly fout times the whole distance from the earth to the moon. Thus, in fact, the moon makes its revolutions round the earth within a space, scarcely more than half the size of the body of the sun. What a Power must that be, which watches and feeds such a fire![1]
Such is the central orb which gives light and warmth to our system. Look, now, at the series of globes that circle round it, ranged one beyond another,—the farthest, Neptune, at the enormous distance of three thousand millions of miles,—all glittering with light borrowed from that central orb. And how swiftly, though silently, those orbs are moving. Look at our own earth,— the third in order,—sweeping on at the enormous rate of sixty-eight thousand miles an hour, or more than a thousand miles every minute (now, while I write these words, we have travelled through space a thousand miles). Trying to conceive of it, and finding our powerlessness, we begin to understand the grandeur of the works of the Almighty.
Observe, next, that several of these globes have other little globes, moons, revolving round them, as they themselves revolve round the sun, and all shining as they move. How beautiful a system! what exquisite harmony and order, and yet on so vast a scale!
- ↑ Professor Olmsted, of Yale College, in his Mechanism of the Heavens, after examining and refuting Herschel's theory of the sun's being an opaque body encompassed with luminous clouds, concludes with the following observation: "I think, therefore, we must confess our ignorance of the nature and constitution of the sun; nor can we, as astronomers, obtain much more satisfactory knowledge respecting it, than the common apprehension, namely, that it is an immense globe of fire." See Chap. X.
