power and goodness of the Creator in a manner at once sublime and philosophic. I consider indeed the paper on Omnipresence and Omniscience as one of the most perfect, impressive, and instructive pieces of composition that ever flowed from the pen of an uninspired moralist. The opening is peculiarly soothing and sweet, and presents us with a night scene of uncommon majesty and beauty.

"I was yesterday," says the author, "about sun-set, walking in the open fields, until the night insensibly fell upon me. I at first amused myself with all the richness and variety of colours which appeared in the western parts of heaven; in proportion as they faded away and went out, several stars and planets appeared one after another, until the whole firmament was in a glow. The blueness of the ether was exceedingly heightened and enlivened by the season of the year, and by the rays of all those luminaries that passed through it. The galaxy appeared in its most beautiful white. To complete the scene, the full moon rose at length in that clouded majesty which Milton takes notice of, and opened to the eye a new picture of nature, which was more finely shaded, and disposed among softer lights, than that which the sun had before discovered to us."

To this exquisite passage immediately succeed the following awful reflections:

"As I was surveying the moon walking in her brightness, and taking her progress among the constellations, a thought rose in me, which I believe very often perplexes and disturbs men of serious and contemplative natures. David himself fell into it in that reflection, When I consider the heavens the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained; what is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou regardest him!' In the same manner, when I considered that infinite host of stars, or, to speak more philosophically, of suns, which were then shining upon me, with those innumerable sets of planets or worlds, which were moving round their respective suns; when I still enlarged the idea, and supposed another heaven of suns and worlds rising still above this which we discovered, and these still enlightened by a superior firmament of luminaries, which are planted at so great a distance, that they may appear to the inhabitants of the former as the stars do to us; in short, while I pursued this thought, I could not but reflect on that little insignificant figure which I myself bore amidst the immensity of God's works."

Could our author have lived to witness the im

provements upon the telescope, and the consequent discoveries of Dr. Herschel, he would have considered the survey of the heavens he has taken in this paper, however extensive and extraordinary it might appear at the commencement of the eighteenth century, as far beneath the truth, and extremely limited and confined. "The visible system of nature," says Herschel," which we call the universe, consisting of all the celestial bodies, and many more that can be seen by the naked eye, is only a group of stars, or suns with their planets, constituting one of those patches called a nebula; and this is, perhaps, not one ten thousandth part of the universe." He then goes on to prove, that the sun is situated in the great stratum called the milky way; and after pointing out the method by which the sun's place in this siderial stratum may be ascertained, he proceeds to take a view of the heavens from our own retired station in one of the planets, commencing his observations by contemplating a star and its combinations with the naked eye.

"The stars of the first magnitude," he observes," being in all probability the nearest, will furnish us with a step to begin the scale. Setting off, therefore, with the distance of Sirius or Arcturus, for instance, as unity, we shall at present suppose, that those of the second magnitude are at double, those of the third at treble the dis

tance, &c. Taking it for granted, then, that a star of the seventh magnitude (the smallest visible to the naked eye) is about seven times as far as one of the first, it follows, that an observer, who is inclosed in a globular cluster of stars, and not far from the centre, will never be able, by his naked eye, to see to the end of it; for since, according to the foregoing estimations, he can only extend his view to about seven times the distance of Sirius, it cannot be expected that his eyes should reach the borders of a cluster, which has, perhaps, no less than 50 stars in depth every where around him. The whole universe, therefore, to an observer, confined to unassisted vision, will be comprized in a set of constellations richly ornamented with scattered stars of all sizes. if the united brightness of a neighbouring cluster of stars should, in a remarkably clear night, reach his sight, it will put on the appearance of a small, faint, whitish nebulous cloud, not to be perceived without the greatest attention. Let us suppose him placed in a much extended stratum, or branching cluster of millions of stars : here the heavens will not only be richly scattered over with brilliant constellations, but a shining zone or milky way will be perceived to surround the whole sphere of the heavens, owing to the combined light of the stars that are too remote to be seen; our observer's sight will be

Or,

so confined, that he will imagine this single collection of stars, though he does not perceive the thousandth part of them, to be the whole contents of the heavens. Allowing him now the use of a common telescope, he begins to suspect that all the milkiness of the bright path, which surrounds the sphere, may be owing to stars: he perceives a few clusters of them in various parts of the heavens, and finds also that there is a kind of nebulous patches; but still his views are not extended to reach so far as to the end of the stratum in which he is situated; so that he looks upon these patches as belonging to that system which, to him, seems to comprehend every celestial object. He now increases his power of vision, and, applying himself to a closer observation, finds that the milky way is indeed no other than a collection of very small stars: he perceives that those objects, which had been called nebulæ, are evidently nothing but clusters of stars; their number increases upon him; and whilst he resolves one nebula into stars, he discovers ten new ones that he cannot resolve. He then forms the idea of immense strata of fixed stars, of clusters of stars, and of nebulæ, till going on with such interesting observations, he soon finds that all these appearances arise from the confined situation in which we are placed. Confined it may be justly called, though contained in