en made in astronomy, more especially in the way of its
details through observations, had but just commenced. A vast deal, it is
true, had been accomplished in the way of pure science, though but
little that came home to the understandings and feelings of the mass.
Mark's education had given him an outline of what Herschel and his
contemporaries had been about, however; and when he sat on the Summit,
communing with the stars, and through those distant and still unknown
worlds, with their Divine First Cause, it was with as much familiarity
with the subject as usually belongs to the liberally educated, without
carrying a particular branch of learning into its recesses. He had
increased his school acquisitions a little, by the study and practice of
Navigation, and had several works that he was fond of reading, which may
have made him a somewhat more accurate astronomer than those who get
only leading ideas on the subject. Hours at a time did Mark linger on
the Summit, studying the stars in the clear, transparent atmosphere of
the tropics, his spirit struggling the while to get into closer
communion with that dread Being which had produced all these mighty
results; among which the existence of the earth, its revolutions, its
heats and colds, its misery and happiness, are but specks in the
incidents of a universe. Previously to this period, he had looked into
these things from curiosity and a love of science; now, they impressed
him with the deepest sense of the power and wisdom of the Deity, and
caused him the better to understand his own position in the scale of
created beings.

Not only did our young hermit study the stars with his own eyes, but he
had the aid of instruments. The ship had two very good spy-glasses, and
Mark himself was the owner of a very neat reflecting telescope, which he
had purchased with his wages, and had brought with him as a source of
amusement and instruction. To this telescope there was a brass stand,
and he conveyed it to the tent on the Summit, where it was kept for use.
Aided by this instrument, Mark could see the satellites of Jupiter and
Saturn, the ring of the latter, the belts of the former, and many of
the phenomena of the moon. Of course, the spherical forms of all the
nearer planets, then known to astronomers, were plainly to be seen by
the assistance of this instrument; and there is no one familiar fact
connected with our observations of the heavenly bodies, that strikes the
human min