led with devotion to the dread Being that could hold a universe in
subjection to His will--dwelling with delight on all the discoveries
among the heavenly bodies, that the recent improvements in science and
mechanics have enabled the astronomers to make. Fortunately, he gave
his discourses somewhat of the progressive character of lectures,
leading his listeners on, as it might be step by step, in a way to
render all easy to the commonest understanding. Thus it was, I first
got accurate notions of the almost inconceivable magnitude of space, to
which, indeed, it is probable there are no more positive limits than
there are a beginning and an end to eternity! Can these wonders be, I
thought--and how pitiful in those who affect to reduce all things to
the level of their own powers of comprehension, and their own
experience in practice! Let them exercise their sublime and boasted
reason, I said to myself, in endeavoring to comprehend infinity in any
thing, and we will note the result! If it be in space, we shall find
them setting bounds to their illimitable void, until ashamed of the
feebleness of their first effort, it is renewed, again and again, only
to furnish new proofs of the insufficiency of any of earth, even to
bring within the compass of their imaginations truths that all their
experiments, inductions, evidence and revelations compel them to admit.

"The moon has no atmosphere," said our astronomer one day, "and if
inhabited at all, it must be by beings constructed altogether
differently from ourselves. Nothing that has life, either animal or
vegetable as we know them, can exist without air, and it follows that
nothing having life, according to our views of it, can exist in the
moon:--or, if any thing having life do exist there, it must be under
such modifications of all our known facts, as to amount to something
like other principles of being." "One side of that planet feels the
genial warmth of the sun for a fortnight, while the other is for the
same period without it," he continued. "That which feels the sun must
be a day, of a heat so intense as to render it insupportable to us,
while the opposite side on which the rays of the sun do not fall, must
be masses of ice, if water exist there to be congealed. But the moon
has no seas, so far as we can ascertain; its surface representing one
of strictly volcanic origin, the mountains being numerous to a
wonderful degree. Our instruments enable us to perceive craters, w