look to the admirable adjustments of the magnificent retinue of planets and satellites which sweep around the sun. Every globe has been weighed and poised, every orbit has been measured and bent to its beautiful form. All is changing; but the laws fixed by the wisdom of God, though they permit the rocking to and fro of the system, never introduce disorder, or lead to destruction. All is perfect and harmonious, and the music of the spheres that burn and roll around our sun is echoed by that of ten millions of moving worlds, that sing and shine around the bright suns that reign above."

But have men no other interest in the starry heavens than merely to contemplate them? Do the orbs of the solar system, and the millions of millions of suns in the nearer parts of the universe, glitter but as bright points in the azure concave merely to suggest to us remote though sublime lessons respecting the attributes of the Infinite Creator? Or have we not relations to them which affect our lives, and come home to our hearts, and involve the manifestations to us, now and for ever, of the Infinite One's infinite love and moral glory? Has not our world, though almost a microscopic point in comparison to the maze of systems and universes within view of the telescope, and though but a dark spherical speck, shining solely in the light of a single one of the fixed stars-has it not connections, intimate and special, with the central orb of our system, and with the central regions of the hea ven of heavens, sustaining a character as lofty, and making displays as wonderful, as probably the most magnificent in all the star-powdered empire of "the King eternal and invisible?" This is the thought

about physical things which, immensely more than any other, concerns both the curiosity and the wellbeing of men; and no glance at the wonders of nature can be just or clear which does not say something to illustrate it. Yet, because it leads direct to sermonising, we shall dispose of it in two brief paragraphs.

The economy of living creatures on the earth, is one of reproduction, decay, and death; and, in consequence of changes made upon his bodily nature by sin, it affects man in the same way as the lower animals. A main agency in working it is the rays of the sun co-operating with our atmosphere; and other agencies, subordinate yet essential, are the mutual attractions between the earth and all neighbouring orbs. The influences of mortality spring up no more certainly from arrangements within our world, than from the general arrangements of the planetary system. Man's frame, though originally formed to resist them, was thrown open by sin fully and throughout all time to their power. But another economy has been established over him, to make him live again, and to transfer him in a glorified existence to other and far distant spheres. The eternal God, the second person of Deity, became incarnated on earth, took human substance into personal union with his divine nature, and thus linked our world to the central glories of the universe. He achieved here the work of human redemption; he evolved here the divine contrivance for transmuting the mortal bodies of men into immortality; he set agoing here that series of special divine works by which "the manifold wisdom of God is made known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places." One result will be, that the immor

B

talised bodies of his redeemed will carry away to the celestial glory as much of the earth's substance as will serve to maintain their identity with the mortal bodies which were laid in the grave; and another will be, that their entire persons, body and soul, will exhibit to the view of exalted, intelligent, ever-sinless creatures, throughout the grandest regions of existence, the effects of God's love to men on earth, in the development and completion of the scheme of redemption. All the human inhabitants of the heaven of heavens will for ever speak of the earth, and for ever carry about with them the memorials of what they have experienced and witnessed here of God's displays of his glory.

A physical system of decay and death upon our world, in its place among the planets, is thus intimately associated with a moral system of deliverance and immortalisation in its relations to eternity. Men die under the rays of the material sun, but they live again under the rays of the "Sun of Righteousness;" they all perish from the earth, but all pass away into other worlds; they spend only a brief period in making acquaintance with the things of this life, but learn lessons from them, and make uses of them, which, for good or for evil, will elicit everlasting results in far distant regions of existence. Every man, therefore, or, at least, every reflecting one, feels within him an instinct of intimate connection with remote worlds. As surely as he expects death, and thinks of rotting away to dust, so surely does he expect a future life, and think of soaring among the stars to some centre of effulgence which no mortal eye has ever descried. The starry heavens seem to him for eternity what the

shores of an adopted land are to an emigrant for time— the region in which he will ever rove, whose beauties will ever charm him, and on whose scenes he will imprint all the recollections of his former life. Hence maný an ardent mind, even entirely apart from the proper feelings of religion, regards the earth as her prison, and the stars as her home,-anticipates often and eagerly the time of her release, and, as the poet Akenside beautifully expresses it,

* Disdains to rest her heaven-aspiring wing
Beneath its native quarry. Tired of earth
And this diurnal scene, she springs aloft
Through fields of air, pursues the flying storm,
Rides on the volleyed lightning through the heavens,
Or, yoked with whirlwinds and the northern blast,
Sweeps the long tract of day. Then high she soars
The blue profound, and, hovering round the sun,
Beholds him pouring the redundant stream
Of light; beholds his unrelenting sway
Bend the reluctant planets to absolve
The fated rounds of Time. Thence far effused,
She darts her swiftness up the long career
Of devious comets; through its burning signs
Exulting measures the perennial wheel
Of Nature, and looks back on all the stars,
Whose blended light, as with a milky zone,
Invests the orient. Now amazed she views
The empyreal waste, where happy spirits hold,
Beyond this concave heaven, their calm abode,
And fields of radiance, whose unfading light
Has travelled the profound six thousand years,
Nor yet arrives in sight of mortal things."

CHAPTER IL

THE AIR.

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE ATMOSPHERE-THE HEIGHT AND PRESSURE OF THE ATMOSPHERE-EVAPORATION-THE HUMIDITY OF THE

ATMOSPHERE-DEW-HOAR-FROST-FOGS-CLOUDS-RAIN-PRE

WINDS

TERNATURAL SHOWERS-SNOW-HAIL-AIR-CURRENTS-NOXIOUS SAND-DRIFTS-WHIRLWINDS AND WATERSPOUTS-TORNADOES AND HURRICANES-FIRE-BALLS AND AEROLITES-METEORIC SHOWERS CLIMATE-THE SEASONS-GENERAL VIEW OF THE AT MOSPHERE.

THE air, or atmosphere, is a light elastic fluid. Birds, and beasts, and men, live and move in it as truly as fishes live and move in water. It has real substance and actual weight, just as certainly as the heaviest liquid. It differs from water chiefly in being a mixture of things, in never having the running or the solid form, in always diffusing its contents equably through one other, and in being exceedingly light, and very easily expansible. Its principal ingredients are oxygen gas, which supports life and flame, and nitrogen gas, which cannot in any degree support life or flame, and serves to dilute the oxygen, or to keep it from acting too strongly on plants and animals. Another ingredient, but a remarkably small one, is carbonic acid gas-a chemical compound of oxygen and charcoal. These three ingredients always maintain the same, or very nearly the same, proportions to one