Lawrence's day. Here motion is suddenly
revealed in the midst of nocturnal rest. The still radiance of the vault of
heaven is for a moment animated with life and movement. In the mild
radiance left on the track of the shooting star, imagination pictures the
lengthened path of the meteor through the vault of heaven,
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while, every where around, the luminous asteroids proclaim the existence of
one common material universe.
If we compare the volume of the innermost of Saturn's satellites, or that of
Ceres, with the immense volume of the Sun, all relations of magnitude vanish
from our minds. The extinction of suddenly resplendent stars in Cassiopeia,
Cygnus, and Serpentarius have already led to the assumption of other and
non-luminous cosmical bodies. We now know that the meteoric asteroids,
spherically agglomerated into small masses, revolve round the Sun,
intersect, like comets, the orbits of the luminous larger planets, and
become ignited either in the vicinity of our atmosphere or in its upper
strata.
The only media by which we are brought in connection with other planetary
bodies, and with all portions of the universe beyond our atmosphere, are
light and heat (the latter of which can scarcely be separated from the
former),* and those mysterious powers of attraction exercised by remote
masses, according to the quantity of their constituents, upon our globe, the
ocean, and the strata of our atmosphere.
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