Next appeared Of a Plurality of Worlds, attributed to the Rev. Dr. Whewell, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge; urging the theological not less than the scientific reasons for believing in the old tradition of a single world, and maintaining that “the earth is really the largest planetary body in the solar system,—its domestic hearth, and the only world in the universe.” “I do not pretend,” says Dr. Whewell, “to disprove the plurality of worlds; but I ask in vain for any argument which makes the doctrine probable.” “It is too remote from knowledge to be either proved or disproved.” Sir David Brewster has replied to Dr. Whewell’s Essay, in More Worlds than One, the Creed of the Philosopher and the Hope of the Christian, emphatically maintaining that analogy strongly countenances the idea of all the solar planets, if not all worlds in the universe, being peopled with creatures not dissimilar in being and nature to the inhabitants of the earth. This view is supported in Scientific Certainties of Planetary Life, by T. C. Simon, who well treats one point of the argument—that mere distance of the planets from the central sun does not determine the condition as to light and heat, but that the density of the ethereal medium enters largely into the calculation. Mr. Simon’s general conclusion is, that “neither on account of deficient or excessive heat, nor with regard to the density of the materials, nor with regard to the force of gravity on the surface, is there the slightest pretext for supposing that all the planets of our system are not inhabited by intellectual creatures with animal bodies like ourselves,—moral beings, who know and love their great Maker, and who wait, like the rest of His creation, upon His providence and upon His care.” One of the leading points of Dr. Whewell’s Essay is, that we should not elevate the conjectures of analogy into the rank of scientific certainties; and that “the force of all the presumptions drawn from physical reasoning for the opinion of planets and stars being either inhabited or uninhabited is so small, that the belief of all thoughtful persons on this subject will be determined by moral, metaphysical, and theological considerations.”
WORLDS TO COME—ABODES OF THE BLEST.
Sir David Brewster, in his eloquent advocacy of the doctrine of “more worlds than one,” thus argues for their peopling:
Man, in his future state of existence, is to consist, as at present, of a spiritual nature residing in a corporeal frame. He must live, therefore, upon a material planet, subject to all the laws of matter, and performing functions for which a material body is indispensable. We must consequently find for the race of Adam, if not races that may have preceded him, a material home upon which they may reside, or by which they may travel, by means unknown to us, to other localities in the universe. At the present hour, the inhabitants of the earth are nearly a thousand millions; and by whatever process we may compute the numbers that have existed before the present generation, and estimate those that are yet to inherit the earth, we shall obtain a population which the habitable parts of our globe could not possibly accommodate. If there is not room, then, on our earth for the millions of millions of beings who have lived and died upon its surface, and who may yet live and die during the period fixed for its occupation by man, we can scarcely doubt that their future abode must be on some of the primary or secondary planets of the solar system, whose inhabitants have ceased to exist like those on the earth, or upon planets in our own or in other systems which have been in a state of preparation, as our earth was, for the advent of intellectual life.
“GAUGING THE HEAVENS.”
Sir William Herschel, in 1785, conceived the happy idea of counting the number of stars which passed at different heights and in various directions over the field of view, of fifteen minutes in diameter, of his twenty-feet reflecting telescope. The field of view each time embraced only 1/833000th of the whole heavens; and it would therefore require, according to Struve, eighty-three years to gauge the whole sphere by a similar process.
VELOCITY OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM.
M. F. W. G. Struve gives as the splendid result of the united studies of MM. Argelander, O. Struve, and Peters, grounded on observations made at the three Russian observatories of Dorpat, Abo, and Pulkowa, “that the velocity of the motion of the solar system in space is such that the sun, with all the bodies which depend upon it, advances annually towards the constellation Hercules[17] 1·623 times the radius of the earth’s orbit, or 33,550,000 geographical miles. The possible error of this last number amounts to 1,733,000 geographical miles, or to a seventh of the whole value. We may, then, wager 400,000 to 1 that the sun has a proper progressive motion, and 1 to 1 that it is comprised between the limits of thirty-eight and twenty-nine millions of geographical miles.”
That is, taking 95,000,000 of English miles as the mean radius of the Earth’s orbit, we have 95 × 1·623 = 154·185 millions of miles; and consequently,
English Miles. The velocity of the Solar System 154,185,000 in the year. ”” 422,424 in a day. ”” 17,601 in an hour. ”” 293 in a minute. ”” 57 in a second. The Sun and all his planets, primary and secondary, are therefore now in rapid motion round an invisible focus. To that now dark and mysterious centre, from which no ray, however feeble, shines, we may in another age point our telescopes, detecting perchance the great luminary which controls our system and bounds its path: into that vast orbit man, during the whole cycle of his race, may never be allowed to round.—North-British Review, No. 16.
| English Miles. | ||
| The velocity of the Solar System | 154,185,000 | in the year. |
| ”” | 422,424 | in a day. |
| ”” | 17,601 | in an hour. |
| ”” | 293 | in a minute. |
| ”” | 57 | in a second. |