LETTER II. ON THE FORMATION OF OUR PLANETARY SYSTEM-THE STARS, AND THE COMETS. MY DEAR BOY, I HAVE preferred to lay before you this review of the sacred history of the world in the form of letters, because it will unavoidably be of that excursive nature which best suits this class of our literary composition. The peculiar events and agency, and the intelligent design, that directs and causes them, which distinguish sacred from profane or common history, lead the mind to many considerations and investigations on which it desires to attain every elucidation which patient thought can supply. But these would not suit the direct statements and usual rules of historical writing, in its regular forms. The epistolary style will therefore be adopted, as most convenient for the accomplishment of the purposes of the present undertaking. The fourth rotation of our globe was accompanied by the formation and arrangement of our planetary system. At this period of our creation, Moses places the formation of the sun and moon, and their association with our earth; and expresses the divine order, that they should regulate the illumination of our world, and divide our day into the two natural distinctions of visible light and succeeding darkness, and become the cause of our seasons, and suggest and govern our computations of time. "And ELOHIM said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so."(1) It has not satisfied some, that the sun should be supposed not to have existed before our earth; but why should an an (1) Gen. ch. i. ver. 14, 15, terior subsistence be claimed for it more than for ourselves? There is no reason which makes it necessary that the sun or moon should have been framed at any other era, rather than at this period. We do not know, and we have no means of knowing, at what point of the ever-flowing eternity of that which is alone eternal-the divine subsistence-the creation of our earth, or of any part of the universe, began, nor in what section of it we are living now. All that we can learn explicitly from revelation is, that nearly 6,000 years have passed since our first ancestor began to be. Our chronology, that of scripture, is dated from the period of his creation; and almost 6,000 years have elapsed since he moved and breathed a full-formed man. But what series of time had preceded his formation, or in what portion of the anteceding succession time this was effected, has not been disclosed, and cannot, by any effort of human ingenuity, be now explored. It is an absurdity to talk of a beginning eternity, because that would be a contradiction in terms, and an inconsistency in idea, as far as such a boundless topic could be an idea within us. But yet, all existence, and all time, must have some relative reality with respect to each other. Creation must have begun at some early part of anteceding eternity; and our earth may have had its commencement in such a primeval era, as well as in a later one. We are approaching the six thousandth annual revolution of our globe round the sun. This is all we positively know; but there is no compelling reason, which we can discern, why any thing should have been made earlier than our system. All are alike creations of the Creator, and therefore equal in dignity as to each other, and of equal estimation with him; and therefore the chronology of our being may be as ancient as that of any of the splendid orbs above us. But this is a point on which there seems no possibility of adding to our knowledge, by any exertion of the human intellect; all further information upon it must come from a superior source; and in the absence of this, the one supposition is as probable as the other. But whatever may be the comparative antiquity between our globe and the myriads of radiant bodies which nightly gem the immense expansion of celestial space above us, in their unaltering stations, the most natural idea, as to those which are linked with us in their concurring revolutions round our grand central luminary-and as to the sun himself, which attracts and governs both them and ourselves— and as to that pleasing satellite which makes our night so poetical and so beautiful-is, that they and we had all one coinciding period of existence, and differ little in the chronology of our origin. This fact, at least, seems to be philosophically certain, that all the bodies which compose our planetary system must have been placed at one and the same time in that arrangement, and in those positions, in which we now behold them; because all maintain their present stations, and motions, and distances, by their mutual action on each other: neither could be where they are, nor move as they do, nor subsist as we see them, unless they were all coexisting the presence of each is essential to the system which they constitute-the sun to them, they to the sun, and all to each other; and this circumstance is a strong indication that their formation was simultaneous, and, therefore, that the sun did not precede our earth in his formation, but was made as that was framing, just as Moses has narrated. Each of the planets, and the sun, have, no doubt, their several peculiar uses; but they have also been fabricated with mutual relations, and for common purposes. Our system of animated and vegetable nature could not subsist without the sun. We could not have our seasons, our daylight, or our years, without him. He, therefore, has been made expressly for us, as well as for the substances and beings that he may contain within himself. He has equally been made for our sister stars, to whom he is apparently as indispensable as he is to us. The true chronology of these noble structures seems therefore to be, that the sun and the planets were formed while our earth was creating. The sun and moon, for their uses to us, as well as for those to themselves and to the bodies that, with us, circle around them—and this, the Hebrew author intimates, when he adds "And Elohim made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: the stars also.(2) The stars with which we are connected, are the six planets: distinguished by the names of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus; and those four smaller ones, (2) Gen. i. 16. That the stars here mentioned, were the planets of discovered within the present century, and called the telescopic planets, because they are not discernible without the aid of a very powerful astronomical instrument: though, perhaps, instead of them, the more ancient one of which they are conjectured to be the wandering fragments, was the primeval companion of the other six.(3) The immense distance which separates the stars that belong to our system, from the other unmoving ones, that shine in the infinity of space beyond, increases the probability that Moses alluded only to those with which our earth is concerned.(4) Of the creation of the rest, as they are no part of our cosmogony, but belong to other orders and systems of existence, with which, at present, we have no relations, no account is transmitted to us. They are indeed the most splendid mysteries of nature. They are known to us only as radiant points; for the most powerful telescopes cannot farther enlarge them ;(5) and yet our scientific contemporaries are ascertaining that their number amounts to a multitude, which our system, and not the fixed stars, seems a just inference, from the fact, that after mentioning them, Moses immediately subjoins, “And Elohim set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night." Ver. 17. Now the stars which were more peculiarly set in the firmament with direct relation to our earth, were the planets, two of whom are connected with our day and night, for Venus and Jupiter alternately become our morning and evening stars, and give a light to earth in their transcendent brilliancy, which no fixed star affords. (3) These four minute bodies, if all were put together, would not exceed the magnitude of the moon; they are not larger than some of our islands. And Olbers has suggested, that they may be the fragments of a greater planet, which has burst by some explosive force. It has been calculated that an exploding velocity "twenty times greater than that of a cannon ball, would be sufficient to make these describe orbits similar to those described by the other planets." Harte, note to La Place, vol. 1. p. 334. They are, Ceres, discovered by Piazzi, 1800; La Place, p. 71. They are so small, that Dr. Herschel judged the diameter of Ceres to be only 160 miles, and that of Pallas but 80. He called them Asteroids. (4) La Place gives an astounding idea of the distance of our system from the great host of the heavens; for he says, "Those stars which, from their great brilliancy, appear to be nearest to us, are at least 200,000 times farther from us than the sun." Systême, vol. 1. p. 172. Dr. Wollaston reckoned Sirius, the beautiful star near the lower part of Orion, to be 525,481 times more distant from us than the sun. Dr. Bradley reasoned, that y Draco was 400,000 times the same distance. (5) La Place, vol. 1. p. 80. their predecessors never imagined, and which seems to exceed all our powers of fully exploring.(6) Of these it is remarkable, that they are undergoing changes for which we have no means of accounting, but which display mighty causes to be there in active operation.(7) Sometimes the alterations are gradual, and observable by human care, though not explainable by the acutest minds of science.(8) Sometimes they indicate an actual destruction.(9) It is one of the wonders of creation, that any phenomena of bodies at such an immense distance from us should be perceptible by human sight; but it has clearly been a part of the Divine Maker's plan, that although they do not act physically upon us, yet that they should be so far objects of our consciousness, (6) Mr. Bessell, of Königsberg, observed in three years between 30,000 and 40,000 stars comprehended within a zone extending 15 degrees on each side of the equator; but even this great number is but a small portion of the whole within the limit of the zone which he examined. To procure a more complete survey, the Academy of Berlin proposed, that this same zone should be parcelled out among twenty-four observers, and that each should confine himself to an hour of right ascension, and examine it in minute detail. This was adopted; and the eighteenth hour was confided to Professor Inghirami, of Florence, and examined with so much care, that the positions of 75,000 stars have been determined in it." Edin. Rev. May 1830, p. 91. If this number was ascertained to be in one part only out of twenty-four, the amount in the other twenty-three positions of this zone, and in the rest of the heavens, will reach a magnitude that makes the divine promise to Abraham not a mere emphatic simile, but an exact comparison. "Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them: So shall thy seed be." Gen. ch. xv. ver. 5. If the nebulæ that abound so much above are truly resolvable into clusters of stars, the multiplicity of these radiant bodies is indeed, at present, innumerable. (7) Thus, "a new and brilliant fixed star was twice extinguished during Gallileo's life. The temporary star in Cassiopeia, observed by C. Gemma in 1572, was so bright as to be seen at noon day. That in Serpentine, first seen by Kepler in 1604, exceeded in brilliancy all the other stars and planets." J. W. Herschel's Discourse, p. 115. (8) La Place observes of the Cassiopeian star, "In a short time it surpassed the most beautiful stars, even Jupiter himself, in brilliancy. Its fight afterwards grew feeble, and in sixteen months after its discovery, it disappeared, without having changed its place in the heavens. Its color experienced considerable variations; it was first of a dazzling white, afterwards of a reddish yellow, and lastly of a lead-colored white. What was the cause of these phenomena?" Systême, vol. 1, p. 81. (9) The idea of La Place, is reasonable: "As to those stars which suddenly shine forth with a very vivid light, and then immediately disappear; it is extremely probable that great conflagrations, produced by extraordinary causes, take place on their surface. This conjecture is confirmed by their change of color, which is analogous to that presented to us on the earth by those bodies which are set on fire, and then gradually extinguished." Systême, p. 81. |