them, appears omnipotent as ever. But it does not advance inquiry, nor
assist us in explaining the wonders we contemplate in our own globe.
Suppose a planet formed by the author's process, what kind of a body
would it be? Something, as Professor WHEWELL suggests, resembling a
large meteoric stone. How after wards came this unformed mass to be like
our earth, to be covered with motion and organization, with life and
general felicity? What primitive cause stocked it with plants and
animals, and produced all the surprising and subtle contrivances which
we find in their structure, all the wide and profound mutual dependence
which we trace in their economy? Is it possible to conceive, as the
_Vestiges_ inculcate, that man, with his sentiment and intellect, his
powers and passions, his will and conscience, were also produced as the
ultimate result of vapourous condensation?

One more conjecture of the author, in this division of his subject, we
shall only notice. It is that "the formation of bodies in space _is
still in progress_." What may be doing in the nebulæ, in the region
scarcely within reach of telescopic vision, in what may be considered
the yet uninclosed and commonable waste of the universe, is a subject,
we suspect, of much obscurity, and respecting which no precise
intelligence has been received; but limiting attention to the solar
system, which is nearer home and more within cognizance, the work seems
finished, perfect, and unchangeable, and, like the Great Architect, made
to endure for ever. This was the conclusion of LAPLACE; he proved that
the state of our system is _stable_; that is, the ellipsis the planets
describe will always remain nearly circular, and the axis of revolution
of the earth will never deviate much from its present position. He also
gave a mathematical proof that this stability is not accidental, but the
result of design, of an arrangement by which the planets all move in the
same direction, in orbits of small eccentricity and slightly inclined to