nd
times ten thousand worlds, all peopled with rational creatures," it
certainly is not a piety in precise accordance with the Christian
scriptures.

SECTION IV. It is also no more than just, that we should bear in mind
the apparent fitness or otherwise, of these bodies, so far as we are
acquainted with them, for the dwelling-place of rational creatures. Not
to mention the probable extreme coldness of Jupiter and Saturn, the heat
of the sunbeams in the planet Mercury is understood to be such as
that water would unavoidably boil and be carried away(71), and we can
scarcely imagine any living substance that would not be dissolved and
dispersed in such an atmosphere. The moon, of which, as being so much
nearer to us, we may naturally be supposed to know most, we are told
by the astronomers has no water and no atmosphere, or, if any, such an
atmosphere as would not sustain clouds and ascending vapour. To our eye,
as seen through the telescope, it appears like a metallic substance,
which has been burned by fire, and so reduced into the ruined and ragged
condition in which we seem to behold it. The sun appears to be still
less an appropriate habitation for rational, or for living creatures,
than any of the planets. The comets, which describe an orbit so
exceedingly eccentric, and are subject to all the excessive vicissitudes
of heat and cold, are, we are told, admirably adapted for a scene
of eternal, or of lengthened punishment for those who have acquitted
themselves ill in a previous state of probation. Buffon is of opinion,
that all the planets in the solar system were once so many portions of
our great luminary, struck off from the sun by the blow of a comet, and
so having received a projectile impulse calculated to carry them
forward in a right line, at the same time that the power of attraction
counteracts this impulse, and gives them that compound principle of
motion which retains them in an orbicular course. In this sense it may
be said that all the planets were suns; while on the contrary Herschel
pronounces, that the sun itself is a planet, an opake body, richly
stored with inhabitants(72).

(71) Encyclopaedia Londinensis, Vol. II, p. 355.

(72) Philosophical Transactions for 1795, p. 68.

The modern astronomers go on to account to us for the total
disappearance of a star in certain cases, which, they say, may be in
reality the destruction of a system, such as that of our sun and its
attendant pla