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that, within a very few hours of the communication to them of Le Verrier's last calculations,-as soon indeed as darkness permitted examination,-German eyes had seen what he might as easily have seen many months before. Our only regret with regard to Mr. Adams is, that the modesty natural to youth and obscurity prevented his at once publishing results, whose value they who were entrusted with them seem to have been so incapable of appreciating; when surely among all our British observers we might have hoped to have found one more wakeful, in eye and mind alike, than Professor Challis. But there are other circumstances still, which make the history of this discovery a painful one for the Englishman. We find from Mr. Airey's defensive statement itself, that the same faithlessness which has exercised so baneful an influence on the fame of Mr. Adams, has in all probability been the means of preventing the discovery being perfected ten years ago. In 1834, as we have already mentioned, the Rev. Mr. Hussey communicated to that gentleman his idea that the irregularities of the path of Uranus were due to the perturbing influence of an unknown planet, revolving beyond that orb; and, backed by the coincident idea of M. Bouvard, who had previously been occupied in rectifying the theory of Uranus, requested the opinion of the English astronomer as to the possibility of investigating the suspected orb from these irregularities. The answer of the latter substantially was, that our mathematics were not adequate to such a task. In 1837, M. Bouvard again communicated with him on the subject; but his previous scepticism seems to have held out still. One reason-almost the only shadow of one, indeed—assigned by Mr. Airey for this scepticism is, that he did not conceive Bode's law of distance would be found to hold good beyond the orbit of Uranus; and that, therefore, it was vain to search in this way for an orb whose position in space was wholly unknown. We do not see what bearing Bode's law has on the matter at all. We presume neither of the two discoverers assumed it as holding certainly good with regard to the mass they were in search of: if they had, their labours would have been greatly increased, their results far less satisfactory, and probably the issue long postponed; for the body, as we have seen, deviates to a very considerable extent from that law. Indeed, the only relation we can discover between this conception or conjecture—for it was nothing more—and the inferences grounded on it, is one which seems to indicate that the mathematics of the English student and the French philosopher are of a higher order than those of Mr. Airey. The most elaborate problem he seems to have considered solvable is: given a known result, aud one of the elements of its causal origination,

ing it.

to find the other elements thereof: that which they addressed themselves, and successfully, to solve,-given a certain result, to find all the unknown elements of the body or force originat

We love, however, to dissociate this noble achievement from all these painful concomitants of unjustifiable prejudice and inefficient observation, and to picture it to ourselves in all the unexaggerated greatness of its simplicity and power. A lonely, almost sunless planet, far withdrawn into the dim voids of space, nearly to the limit of human power of search for star so pale and small, has wandered slightly from the path which man has traced out as the one allotted to it among the hosts of heaven. It is but a little way; a hairbreadth here and a hairbreadth there; and that

a path in its full extent is very vast: surely such deviation can be of small account in it; and surely, too, man may easily have lost himself amid these mighty journeyings, and erred these hairbreadths in his prophecy of such a cycle. Not so; his prophecy again and again is tested by a mightier power of numbers than Pythagoras dreamt of, and no fault is found in it: and not so too for the path itself; these hairbreadth aberrations, if unaccounted for, indicate that law is powerless, and order all gone wrong. And now the thoughtful student bends in his solitude over the records of these deviations. He seeks to behold in its obscurity of dimness and distance a heavenly orb on which the eye of man has never yet been fixed; but his eye never eeks the heavens : and night after night the stars come out in the fulness of their glory and the kindliness of their love, yet fail to woo him from the complex records and figured papers over which his pale and aching forehead droops. His chase is one which leads him forth into the unknown of things, and the unknown and far off

But it is the mind and the soul alone which journey thither. Shut out that glaring sun from him: its light cannot aid him; and he is seeking a realm where, if its force is, its light can hardly be. Shut out those gleaming night-stars too: he seeks to know the place of this hidden one among their multitudes; but they cannot and will not direct him. These loose scraps of paper, covered with strange devices and complicated signs, are of more avail than all the guidance and enlightenment of sun or stars. The haven is gained at last; he stands in spirit upon the new found world; surveys its greatness, tracks its path, feels the whirl of its flight, casts one brief glance from it into the yet deeper night beyond; and bids others, whose task it is, seek and see it with the bodily eye. And it is according to his faith; his faith in the power of numbers, in the stability of order, in the assurance and perfection of law; and deviation and irregularity stand revealed as results of the perfection of order and the assurance of law; or—to go to the essence and reality of which order and law are but the apparent and sensible exponents—of the presence in His providence, faithfulness, and power, of Him who calleth all these stars out by name, and leadeth them on in order.

of space.

We must once more pass beyond the restricted limits of our solar system, into the wider realm of firmamental life and energy --though only to our own home firmament—in order very briefly to lay before our readers Dr. Mädler's theory of his central sun, or rather, the practical results of it: and it may be the more briefly, as it is a theory which may be received as true for a hundred years, and disproved and overthrown in the hundred and first. "The motion of our sun through space, long suspected, and first definitely asserted by Sir William Herschel about the beginning of this century, has almost ever since been occupying the attention and tasking the powers of many of the most illustrious among modern astronomers. This motion has been assumed to be an orbitual one, connected with and resulting from the assumed nature of firmamental arrangement: in fact, its orbitual movement round the centre of force common to it and all the orbs of our firmamental system. And it became of the utmost interest to determine the direction of this movement, and the location of this centre. The first definite inference with regard to these points was that of Herschel, who announced his belief that the present motion of our sun is towards the constellation Hercules. Subsequent observers have endeavoured still more exactly to define the nature and direction of this movement: and Dr. Mädler of Dorpat now announces, as the result of more than thirty years of observation and calculation, the star which either has represented within its mass that common centre of force, or which is located so near the abstract reality of it, that its own orbitual motion is inappreciable; and the nature, direction, and period of the path which our sun is describing around it. We can only define here very briefly and generally the practical results to which his reasonings have conducted him. These are as follow:-The Pleiades, a constellation with which, we believe, almost all are familiar, according to him, constitutes the central group of this firmamental system; and the star Alcyone, the brightest orb of that beautiful constellation, and which the others appear to surround, he regards as entitled to be considered the central orb not only of it, but of the entire astral arrangement. The distance of our sun from this centre of force, or rather this sensible representative of it, he calculates at 34,000,000 times the distance of the earth from the sun; that is,

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a distance which light, travelling at the rate of above 10,000,000 miles a minute, would require 540 years to traverse: the period in which, journeying at the rate of 130,000 miles an hour, he accomplishes this great cyclical revolution, at 18,200,000 of our years: and the aggregate value of all the orbs composing our firmament, up to his own distance from the centre, at nearly 118,000,000 times the mass of our sun. The general arrangement of the stars in the system, as inferred by him in the course of his investigations, is peculiar and most interesting Around the central group, the Pleiades-a group whose orbs are remarkably crowded together-stretches a best proportionately barren of stars: beyond this is located a second crowded zone, succeeded in its turn by a second poorer one; and so on through a considerable number of richer and poorer rings. These richer zones, however, are not isolated from each other at every point by the intervening opposites; but frequently connected by communicating belts or layers, stretching through the less crowded star-realms. Nor are the successive layers uniform as to distribution of orbs throughout their separate individual extents. They exhibit occasional grouping and crowding together of them, as if in subordinate, though still extensive associations;* although the more prevalent features are of single, or binary, ternary, and similar systems of stars.

Throughout all this theory, we are brought into contact with vast numbers, mighty distances, and majestic periods; orbits such as our own earth traverses, save that it fulfils its course millions of times over ere these paths are accomplished once ; defined and measurable distances, whose least cumbersome unit of measurement is the radius of its path, which we have been wont to consider great; stars, each, it may be, with its train of attendant worlds, which are numbered by millions and tens of millions. And yet, even while we consciously discern that all this refers but to one of the thousand firmaments which have already been revealed to our search as part of the universe, and this one certainly not the greatest among these, yet is the first and natural feeling not of amazement, not of overwhelming, not of adoration, but of blank and chill disappointment. The numberless has begun to be numbered, the unmeasurable to be measured, the indefinite to be defined. It is no longer a dim and far-looming form that recedes before us, towers above us, and stretches down beneath us. Its boundaries no longer shade and melt away in the brightness of the glory of unexhausted indefinitude ; they are beginning to show clear and sharp as the

* See page 27

SUCCESSIVE EXPANSIONS OF THE UNIVERSE BEFORE MAN. 39

lines of the mountain against the morning sky. That spirit within us, which has been created capable of full satisfying of its capacities and full exhaustion of its powers alone in the Infinite One, demands that physical nature shall, in every direction, present such impress as could be communicated to her of His infinity, and everywhere symbolise it by her clear indefinity. And this weighing the aggregate, measuring the spaces, telling the times of firmaments—the mightiest units which man has yet discovered, and, as he at present deems, the ultimate units whose mere multiple is the all of physical creation - seems to the spirit begun approach, in one direction, to the outer boundary; and leads it to think with disappointment and despondency of a universe measured out as to its extent in space and in time, and presenting alone its indefinitudes of variety and detail as remaining. The feeling is natural as a first, but not as a permanent one. The remembrance of the past should reprove and rebut it. Often before have then indefinites become defined; and only served as standing-points, whence to see the looming up and before us of a greater indefinite. And the measuring of this old one should only urge us to prepare the mind for farther seeing—the soul for farther expanding. And even already there appears faintly gleaming on the horizon of our present knowledge the prospect of a mightier indefinite: and in the special abundance, the clustering together, it almost seems, in certain regions of the heavens, of these firmamental aggregations, there is suggestion of the possible existence of systems in which they are but as the planet in the solar, or the sun in the firmamental scheme; associated and revolving units, with their common centres, their appointed orbits, their mutual disturbances, their times and seasons, days and years. And faith yet more should reprove and rebut itfaith in the infinity of Him who has appointed the physical universe to shadow forth, according to its capability, that infinity. It is, it can be, to His essential nature, only the light which veils -the garment which shrouds—the hiding of His glory and grace. His infinitude it must toil to suggest, rather than reveal, by long and unresting succession; and His eternity, through its unceasing change. But this is because of the kind and the nature of His perfection, not because of its imperfection. His character who has created is our assurance that all is done which can be done through means of it with a view to the illustration of that character; and our guarantee, while we lift up our eyes to the heavens, and behold, and consider Him who created all these,' and created them for Himself,—that but a little portion of them is yet revealed.

The mention of this central sun, Alcyone, may possibly

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