rding to their national superstition, the earth is supported
on the back of an elephant, and this on a succession of animals, the
last of which is a tortoise. It is not to be supposed that the Brahmans,
who wrote commentaries on the Surya Siddhanta, should for a moment have
accepted these preposterous delusions--that was impossible for such
great geometers; yet led, perhaps, by a wish to do nothing that might
disturb public feeling, they engaged in the hopeless task of showing
that their profound philosophical discoveries were not inconsistent with
the ancient traditions; that a globular and revolving earth might be
sustained on a descending succession of supporting beasts. But they had
the signal advantage over us that those popular traditions conceded to
them that limitless time for which we have had to struggle.

[Sidenote: The life of the universe.] The progression of life on the
surface of our planet is under the guidance of pre-ordained and
resistless law--it is affiliated with material and correspondingly
changing conditions. It suggests that the succession of organic forms
which, in a due series, the earth's surface in the long lapse of time
has presented, is the counterpart of a like progress which other planets
in the solar system exhibit in myriads of years, and leads us to the
conception of the rise, development, and extinction of a multiplicity of
such living forms in other systems--a march of life through the
universe, and its passing away.

[Sidenote: Multiplicity of worlds implies succession of worlds.]
Magnitudes and times, therefore, go parallel with one another. With the
abandonment of the geocentric theory, and of the doctrine of the human
destiny of the universe, have vanished the unworthy hypotheses of the
recent date of creation and the approaching end of all things. In their
stead are substituted more noble ideas. The multiplicity of worlds in
infinite space leads to the conception of a succession of worlds in
infinite time. This existing universe, with all its splendours, had a
beginning, and will have an end; it had its predecessors, and will have
its successors; but its march through all its transformations is under
the control of laws as unchangeable as destiny. As a cloud, which is
composed of myriads of separate and isolated spherules of water, so
minute as to be individually invisible, on a summer's afternoon changes
its aspect and form, disappearing from the sky, and being replaced in
su