It is not at all probable that among the million spheres of the universe there is a single one exactly like our earth—like it in the possession of air and of water, like it in size and in composition. It does not seem probable that a man could live for one hour on any body in the universe except the earth, or that an oak-tree could live in any other sphere for a single season. Men can dwell on the earth, and oak-trees can thrive therein, because the constitutions of the man and of the oak are specially adapted to the particular circumstances of the earth.
Could we obtain a closer view of some of the celestial bodies, we should probably find that they, too, teem with life, but with life specially adapted to the environment—life in forms strange and weird; life far stranger to us than Columbus found it to be in the New World when he first landed there. Life, it may be, stranger than ever Dante described or Doré sketched. Intelligence may also have a home among those spheres no less than on the earth. There are globes greater and globes less—atmospheres greater and atmospheres less. The truest philosophy on this subject is crystallised in the language of Tennyson:—
"This truth within thy mind rehearse,
That in a boundless universe
Is boundless better, boundless worse.
"Think you this mould of hopes and fears
Could find no statelier than his peers
In yonder hundred million spheres?"
PLATE X.
TYCHO AND ITS SURROUNDINGS.
(AFTER NASMYTH.)