common. Each exists, apart and independently, _in
the bosom of its proper and particular God_.

In the conduct of this Discourse, I am aiming less at physical than at
metaphysical order. The clearness with which even material phaenomena are
presented to the understanding, depends very little, I have long since
learned to perceive, upon a merely natural, and almost altogether upon a
moral, arrangement. If then I seem to step somewhat too discursively
from point to point of my topic, let me suggest that I do so in the hope
of thus the better keeping unbroken that chain of _graduated impression_
by which alone the intellect of Man can expect to encompass the
grandeurs of which I speak, and, in their majestic totality, to
comprehend them.

So far, our attention has been directed, almost exclusively, to a
general and relative grouping of the stellar bodies in space. Of
specification there has been little; and whatever ideas of _quantity_
have been conveyed--that is to say, of number, magnitude, and
distance--have been conveyed incidentally and by way of preparation for
more definitive conceptions. These latter let us now attempt to
entertain.

Our solar system, as has been already mentioned, consists, in chief, of
one sun and sixteen planets certainly, but in all probability a few
others, revolving around it as a centre, and attended by seventeen moons
of which we know, with possibly several more of which as yet we know
nothing. These various bodies are not true spheres, but oblate
spheroids--spheres flattened at the poles of the imaginary axes about
which they rotate:--the flattening being a consequence of the rotation.
Neither is the Sun absolutely the centre of the system; for this Sun
itself, with all the planets, revolves about a perpetually shifting
point of space, which is the system's general centre of gravity. Neither
are we to consider the paths through which these different spheroids
move--the moons about the planets, the planets about the Sun, or the Sun
about the common centre--as circles in an accurate sense. They are, in
fact, _ellipses--one of the foci being the point about which the
revolution is made_. An ellipse is a curve, returning into itself, one
of whose diameters is longer than the other. In the longer diameter are
two points, equidistant from the middle of the line, and so situated
otherwise that if, from each of them a straight line be drawn to any one
point of the curve, the two lines, taken t