lt processes of nature, and the common and obvious
motives which influence large masses of their fellows; until at length
the sublime contrivances of the universe sink, in their interpretation
of them, into the clumsy expedients of a bungling mechanism.

Tested by their reading of the phenomena on this principle, we find
curious gradations between the higher and the humbler orders of minds.
The vortices of Descartes, for instance, involve but a simple idea, that
might have been struck out by almost any individual of a tolerably
lively fancy, who had walked by the side of a winding river, and seen
sticks and straws revolving in its eddies. But no fancy, however active,
or no reach of mere common sense, however respectable, could have
originated, or conducted to a successful conclusion, that profound
contemplation into which Newton fell in the garden of Woolsthorpe, when
he saw the loosened apple drop from the tree, and succeeded in
demonstrating that the planets are retained in their orbits by the same
law which impels a falling pebble towards the ground. So little obvious,
indeed, was the Newtonian scheme, that most of the contemporary
generation of philosophers,--some of them, such as Fontenelle and his
brother academicians of France, men of no mean standing,--died rejecting
it. And the objections of Turrettine to the motion of the earth on its
axis are, we find, still more obvious than even the idea of the
vortices. It does at first seem natural enough to suppose, that if the
earth's surface be speeding eastwards at the rate of several hundred
miles in the hour (a thousand miles at the equator), the birds which
flutter over it should be somewhat in danger of being left behind; and
that atoms and down flakes floating in the atmosphere in a time of calm,
instead of appearing, as they often do, either in a state of rest, or
moving with equal freedom in every direction, ought to be seen hurrying
westwards, as if puffed by the breath of a tornado. Such an objection
must for a time have appeared as just as it seems obvious, especially in
one's study on a Saturday night, with much of one's lecture still to
write, and the Sabbath too near to permit of verification or experiment.
Fontenelle, however, though he could not get over the difficulty of
conceiving how the same gravitation which made a stone fall also kept
the moon in its place, fairly surmounted that which puzzled Turrettine;
and in his "Plurality of Worlds,"--a publi