On such a terrestrial globe the highest mountains would be about an eightieth of an inch high, and consequently only just distinguishable. We may imagine therefore how imperceptible would be the largest animals. The whole organized covering of such a globe would be quite undiscoverable by the eye, except perhaps by colour, like the bloom on a plum. In order to restore this earth and its inhabitants to their true dimensions, we must magnify them forty millions of times; and to preserve the proportions, we must increase equally the distances of the sun and of the stars from us. They seem thus to pass off into infinity; yet each of them thus removed, has its system of mechanical and perhaps of organic processes going on upon its surface. But the arrangements of organic life which we can see with the naked eye are few, compared with those which the microscope detects. We know that we may magnify objects thousands of times, and still discover fresh complexities of structure; if we suppose, therefore, that we increase every particle of matter in our universe in such a proportion, in length, breadth, and thickness, we may conceive that we tend thus to bring before our apprehension a true estimate of the quantity of organized adaptations which are ready to testify the extent of the Creator’s power. 3. The other numerical quantities which we have to consider in the phenomena of the universe are on as gigantic a scale as the distances and sizes. By the rotation of the earth on its axis, the parts of the equator move at the rate of a thousand miles an hour, and the portions of the earth’s surface which are in our latitude, at about six hundred. The former velocity is nearly that with which a cannon ball is discharged from the mouth of a gun; but, large as it is, it is inconsiderable compared with the velocity of the earth in its orbit about the sun. This latter velocity is sixty-five times the former. By the rotatory motion of the earth, a point of its surface is carried sometimes forwards and sometimes backwards with regard to the annual progression; but in consequence of the great predominance of the latter velocity in amount, the former scarcely affects it either way. And even the latter velocity is inconsiderable compared with that of light; which comparison, however, we shall not make; since, according to the theory we have considered as most probable, the motion of light is not a transfer of matter but of motion from one part of space to another. The extent of the scale of density of different substances has already been mentioned; gold is twenty times as heavy as water; air is eight hundred and thirty times lighter, steam eight thousand times lighter than water; the luminiferous ether is incomparably rarer than steam: and this is true of the matter of light, whether we adopt the undulatory theory or any other.