ast orbs as we believe surround us even to the extent of
infinite space, should not be "richly stored with rational beings,
the capable witnesses of his power, magnificence and benevolence." All
difficulties arising from the considerations of light, and heat, and a
thousand other obstacles, are to give way to the perfect insight we
have as to how the deity will conduct himself in every case that can be
proposed. I am not persuaded that this is agreeable to religion; and
I am still less convinced that it is compatible with the sobriety and
sedateness of common sense.

It is with some degree of satisfaction that I perceive lord Brougham,
the reputed author of the Preliminary Discourse to the Library of Useful
Knowledge, at the same time that he states the dimensions and distances
of the heavenly bodies in the usual way, says not a word of their
inhabitants.

It is somewhat remarkable that, since the commencement of the present
century, four new planets have been added to those formerly contained in
the enumeration of the solar system. They lie between the planets Mars
and Jupiter, and have been named Vesta, Juno, Ceres and Pallas. Brinkley
speaks of them in this manner. "The very small magnitudes of the new
planets Ceres and Pallas, and their nearly equal distances from the sun,
induced Dr. Olbers, who discovered Pallas in 1802, nearly in the same
place where he had observed Ceres a few months before, to conjecture
that they were fragments of a larger planet, which had by some unknown
cause been broken to pieces. It follows from the law of gravity, by
which the planets are retained in their orbits, that each fragment would
again, after every revolution about the sun, pass nearly through the
place in which the planet was when the catastrophe happened, and besides
the orbit of each fragment would intersect the continuation of the line
joining this place and the sun. Thence it was easy to ascertain the
two particular regions of the heavens through which all these fragments
would pass. Also, by carefully noting the small stars thereabout, and
examining them from time to time, it might be expected that more of the
fragments would be discovered.--M. Harding discovered the planet Juno
in one of these regions; and Dr. Olbers himself also, by carefully
examining them (the small stars) from time to time, discovered Vesta."

These additions certainly afford us a new epoch in the annals of the
solar system, and of astronomy itself.