LETTER II. ON THE FORMATION OF OUR PLANETARY SYSTEM-THE MY DEAR BOY, II. I HAVE preferred to lay before you this Review of LETTER 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, LETTER and become the cause of our seasons, and suggest II. 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 anterior 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 of 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, 1 Gen. ch. i. ver. 14, 15. II. and all time, must have some relative reality with LETTER 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 knowlege, 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 LETTER that arrangement, and in those positions, in which II. 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 co-existing: 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 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.'" "Gen. ver. 16. That the Stars here mentioned, were the Planets of our System, and not the Fixed Stars, seems a just inference, from the II. The Stars with which we are connected, are the six LETTER Planets distinguished by the names of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus; and those four smaller ones, discovered within the present century, and called the Telescopic Planets, because they are not discernible without the aid of a very powerful astronomical instrument: tho, 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. Of the creation of the rest, as 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 occasionally become our morning and evening stars, and give a light to our 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; 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. • 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 D 4 |