The attention of scientific persons, and those of a speculative character in religion, physics, and morals, has recently been recalled to the question,—whether there are grounds for believing the heavenly bodies to be inhabited by rational beings,—by the publication, eleven months ago, of a thin octavo volume of 279 pages, bearing no author’s name, and entitled, _Of the Plurality of Worlds, an Essay_. Internal evidence seemed to point to a distinguished person at Cambridge as the author—a gentleman of great eminence as a mathematician, a logician, a divine, and a moralist—in short, to the Reverend Dr Whewell, the Master of Trinity College. The work was divided into numbered paragraphs, as is usual with that gentleman; peculiarities of spelling—_e. g._, “offense,” instead of “offence”—and of style and expression, are common to the _Essay_ and the other works of the suspected author. We are not aware that up to the present time he has repudiated the work thus attributed to him. On the contrary, he has just published a _Dialogue_, by way of supplement to it, in which he and various classes of objectors are speakers; and on one of them telling him that one of his critics “repeatedly tries to connect his speculations with those of the author of _Vestiges of Creation_,” a wild work of an infidel character, he answers, “If he were to try to connect me with an _answer_ to that work, which went through two editions, under the title of _Indications of the Creator_, he would be nearer the mark; at least, I adopt the sentiments of this latter book.” Now, this latter book was published, certainly not with Dr Whewell’s name on the title-page, but by the publisher of all his other works, and entitled _Indications of the Creator; Theological Extracts from Dr Whewell’s History and Philosophy of Inductive Science_. But whereas the _Essay_ in question is written by the present highly-gifted Master of Trinity, with the design of showing that “the belief of the planets and stars being inhabited is ill-founded—a notion taken up on insufficient grounds, and that the most recent astronomical discoveries point the other way”—the author declaring that these “views have long been in his mind, the convictions which they involve growing gradually deeper, through the effect of various trains of speculation;” it will be found, on referring to Dr Whewell’s _Bridgewater Treatise_, published in 1833, that these views seem not then to have been entertained by him. In book iii. chap. 2, we find him speaking thus: “The earth, the globular body thus covered with life, is not the only globe in the universe. There are circling about our own sun six others, so far as we can judge, perfectly analogous in their nature, besides our moon, and other bodies analogous to it. No one can resist the temptation to conjecture that these globes, some of them much larger than our own, are not dead and barren; that they are, like ours, occupied with life, organisation, intelligence.