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spheres?—that we serve to carry to the suns of this and other systems the ardent fires with which we get impregnated in our passage near Sirius and myriads of other suns?—that we serve to waft beings that have passed their probation, from worlds immeasurably brighter than yours, to spheres infinitely more glorious than theirs? What a boundless field of speculation is open here to the human mind!—of exalted speculation, such as may befit the grandeur of the subject, and the vast intellectual powers of man, and may henceforward take the place of the absurd notions of our influence for good or evil to which the superstitious feelings of mankind in the darker ages, and even in more modern and “enlightened” times, had given birth. It seems hardly credible now that our apparition in the heavens should ever, at any period of time, have been almost universally regarded with feelings of awe and terror, and that to us should have been ascribed the most malignant influences, and a most astonishing diversity of effects, physical, physiological, social, and political. And passing strange that even men like Johannes Kepler should not have been entirely free from this weakness! Seneca alone among ancient philosophers dared to oppose his powerful logic to the superstitious ideas which his age, and the ages that had preceded it, entertained with regard to our apparition in the heavens. He, that marvellous double and counterpart of the great British philosopher of a later period—