“She from the West her silent course advances

With inoffensive pace, that spinning sleeps

On her soft axle, while she paces even,

And bears us soft with the smooth air along.”

From this circumstance arises the apparent diurnal revolution of all the heavenly bodies from east to west.

“The motion of the earth,” says an intelligent writer, “has so long ceased to be a disputed question, that the arguments on each side are nearly forgotten; and those who do not scruple to adopt the hypothesis of the earth’s motions, are often less acquainted with the arguments on which it is supported, than they would have been in former times, when their opinions must have been the subjects of fierce contention.” La Place observes, “that if the earth be at rest, and the stars move, the velocity of these latter must be immense; and yet all the purposes thereof might have been answered by a moderate motion of the earth alone. The moon’s distance from the earth is 240,000 miles; of course, the length of the tract which it traverses, if it moves round the earth in 24 hours, is about 1,500,000; that is, at the rate of 62,500 miles an hour, instead of 2,290 miles, which is really the case: consequently, in each second of time, the moon, known to be the slowest of all the heavenly bodies, must move more than seventeen miles. Again, the sun’s mean distance from the earth is about 95,000,000 miles; consequently, the diurnal path of that luminary, if it revolve about our globe in twenty-four hours, must be 580,000,000: and therefore, in a single second, the beat of a clock, he must move nearly 7,000 miles. Upon the same principle; that is, supposing the earth to be the centre of the system, and not the sun, the planet Mars, in a second of time, must travel at the rate of more than 10,000 miles, Jupiter 36,000, and Saturn 62,000. And, lastly, the fixed stars being yet indefinitely more remote from the earth than the sun or Saturn, their motion in or near the equator must be vastly swifter than this. If the earth does not move round the sun, the sun must move with the moon round the earth; now; the distance of the sun to that of the moon is nearly 400 to 1, and the period of the moon being about twenty-eight days, the sun’s period should be, by the law above mentioned, full 600 years, whereas, it is, in fact, but a single year. This consideration was, of itself, thought of weight enough to determine the controversy between the two opinions, and to establish the motion of the earth in its orbit for ever.”

That the shape of the earth was an extended plane, and the visible horizon its utmost bounds, was the opinion of the ancients. But that it is globular, a little raised at the equator, and flattened at the poles, being about thirty-seven miles shorter than at the equator, so as nearly to resemble an orange, is demonstrable on the most evident and unquestionable principles. 1. All the appearances of the heavens, both at land and at sea, are the same as they would be if the earth were a globe. Mariners first begin to lose sight of the lower parts of objects, and then gradually of the higher parts; also, persons on shore first discover the masts before the hull of approaching vessels, and on leaving a port the masts are seen when the hull is out of sight, which must be owing to the convexity of the water between the eye and the object, otherwise the largest and most conspicuous parts would have been visible the longest.

“Behold, when the glad ship shoots from the port

Upon full sail, the hulk first disappears,

And then the lower, then the higher sails;