The heavenly bodies Author:William Miller Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PAET II. ARE THE HEAVENLY BODIES HABITABLE? ' THE PLURALITY OF WOELDS' CONSIDERED. AEE THE HEAVENLY BODIES HABITABLE? 'THE PLURALITY OF WORLDS' CONSIDER... more »ED. WHEN", on a clear night, we walk out into the open field, and, lifting our eyes to the azure vault, behold a thousand flickering stars scintillating above us, and know that, excepting a very few which are planets of our system, these are all vastly larger than the great globe on which we dwell; and when we reflect that for every shining orb which thus indicates its existence the telescope reveals to us millions more invisible to the unassisted eye; and that beyond the reach of all present, and perhaps of all future, telescopic power, the Universe is filled with other and like orbs, stretching in clusters and vast galaxies in every direction around, to the limitless verge of infinity; and when we conjoin with this grand thought the consciousness that all about on this Earth we see life prevailing in every conceivable shape,—the tendency is not unnatural mentally to conjure up the conception of numerous and diversified animal and vegetable forms in each of these myriad stars, and, in dreamy reverie, to think that upon each sparkling ball there are beings, active and intelligent, peopling and enlivening its every zone. Nay, while the distances, the magnitudes, the velocities, the periods of the heavenly bodies, or some of them, are ascertained by scientific means, with mathematical nicety, to a mile, to a ton, to a fraction of a second of time, but with results so vast that, knowing it all, our imagination refuses to realize figures so precise but so immense,—yet where by no application of the exact sciences, by no disposition of x and y, can there be demonstration of life, or even of a single unit of being, in any one...« less