dle and
the arrogant. Every man (and every woman), however destitute of real
instruction, and unfitted for the investigation of the deep or the
sublime mysteries of our nature, can use his eyes and his hands. The
whole boundless congregation of mankind, with its everlasting varieties,
is thus at once subjected to the sentence of every pretender:

And fools rush in, where angels fear to tread.

Nothing is more delightful to the headlong and presumptuous, than thus
to sit in judgment on their betters, and pronounce ex cathedra on those,
"whose shoe-latchet they are not worthy to stoop down and unloose." I
remember, after lord George Gordon's riots, eleven persons accused were
set down in one indictment for their lives, and given in charge to one
jury. But this is a mere shadow, a nothing, compared with the wholesale
and indiscriminating judgment of the vulgar phrenologist.

ESSAY XXI. OF ASTRONOMY.

SECTION I.

It can scarcely be imputed to me as profane, if I venture to put down
a few sceptical doubts on the science of astronomy. All branches of
knowledge are to be considered as fair subjects of enquiry: and he that
has never doubted, may be said, in the highest and strictest sense of
the word, never to have believed.

The first volume that furnished to me the groundwork of the following
doubts, was the book commonly known by the name of Guthrie's
Geographical Grammar, many parts and passages of which engaged my
attention in my own study, in the house of a rural schoolmaster, in the
year 1772. I cannot therefore proceed more fairly than by giving here
an extract of certain passages in that book, which have relation to
the present subject. I know not how far they have been altered in the
edition of Guthrie which now lies before me, from the language of
the book then in my possession; but I feel confident that in the main
particulars they continue the same(42).

(42) The article Astronomy, in this book, appears to have been written
by the well known James Ferguson.

"In passing rapidly over the heavens with his new telescope, the
universe increased under the eye of Herschel; 44,000 stars, seen in the
space of a few degrees, seemed to indicate that there were seventy-five
millions in the heavens. But what are all these, when compared with
those that fill the whole expanse, the boundless field of aether?

"The immense distance of the fixed stars from our earth, and from each
other, is of all cons