indeed, it is probable there are no more positive limits than there are a
beginning and an end to eternity! Can these wonders be, I thought--and
how pitiful in those who affect to reduce all things to the level of their
own powers of comprehension, and their own experience in practice!
Let them exercise their sublime and boasted reason, I said to myself, in
endeavoring to comprehend infinity in any thing, and we will note the
result! If it be in space, we shall find them setting bounds to their
illimitable void, until ashamed of the feebleness of their first effort, it is
renewed, again and again, only to furnish new proofs of the insufficiency
of any of earth, even to bring within the compass of their imaginations
truths that all their experiments, inductions, evidence and revelations
compel them to admit.

"The moon has no atmosphere," said our astronomer one day, "and if
inhabited at all, it must be by beings constructed altogether differently
from ourselves. Nothing that has life, either animal or vegetable as we
know them, can exist without air, and it follows that nothing having life,
according to our views of it, can exist in the moon:--or, if any thing
having life do exist there, it must be under such modifications of all our
known facts, as to amount to something like other principles of being."
"One side of that planet feels the genial warmth of the sun for a fortnight,
while the other is for the same period without it," he continued. "That
which feels the sun must be a day, of a heat so intense as to render it
insupportable to us, while the opposite side on which the rays of the sun
do not fall, must be masses of ice, if water exist there to be congealed.
But the moon has no seas, so far as we can ascertain; its surface
representing one of strictly volcanic origin, the mountains being
numerous to a wonderful degree. Our instruments enable us to perceive
craters, with the inner cones so common to all our own volcanoes,
giving reason to believe in the activity of innumerable burning hills at