as it since turns out, it became
necessary to adopt more sanguinary measures. The Emperor called up one of
his 'great generals,' and gave him his dreadful orders: 'You must dress
your soldiers,' said he, 'in a very frightful manner, painting their faces
with the most horrid figures, and depicting dragons and monsters on your
banners: you must then rush upon the barbarians with fearful outcries, and
terrify them so that they will fall down flat on their faces; and when
they are once down,' said the Imperial potentate, '_their breeches are so
tight that they can never get up again_!' . . . 'I give you five minutes
every day to look at the stars, but don't particularize; for some in those
far-off places send down their light long after they have been knocked out
of existence, and you may be looking at a blank.' So wrote 'JULIAN' in
this department of our last number. Prof. OLMSTEAD, of Yale-College, in a
recent lecture before the 'Mercantile Library Association,' described the
difficulty of ascertaining the distance of the stars from each other and
from our earth; yet, he remarked, it had been done. The nearest star's
distance from us had been measured, and by the aid of light, by which it
could alone be accomplished. That distance, he said, was immense,
requiring ten years for light to traverse it! The planets, he had no
doubt, were inhabited. Of what use was the reflection of the sun's rays
upon them, if there were no eyes there to behold it? What was the use of
moons, which the planets certainly have? He spoke also of the fixed stars,
which seem by the aid of a telescope to be innumerable. What was their
purpose?--for a guide to mariners? No; for a very small portion of them
could be seen by the unassisted eye. They were suns like our suns, to
worlds like our worlds! To the inhabitants of those fixed stars our sun
appears as a star, and the planetary system revolving around it, of which
the earth is one, are unseen by them, as are those of theirs by us! Great
GOD! 'When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and
the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is _man_, that thou art mindful
of him, and the son of man, that thou visitest him!' . . . OUR
correspondent who writes of '_The Country_,' in preceding pages wields a
facile pen. His allusion to the choice of _names_ for a country-seat
reminds us of the pleasant satire of '_Thinks-I-to-myself_' upon this
theme: 'We lived, you must know,' he writes, 'in a