“Those ungenial minds that can be brought to believe that the earth is the only inhabited body in the universe, will have no difficulty in conceiving that it also might have been without inhabitants. Nay, if such minds are imbued with geological truth, they must admit that for millions of years the earth was without inhabitants; and hence we are led to the extraordinary result, that for millions of years there was not an intelligent creature in the vast dominions of the universal King; and that before the formation of the protozoic strata, there was neither a plant nor an animal throughout the infinity of space! During this long period of universal death, when Nature herself was asleep—the sun, with his magnificent attendants—the planets, with their faithful satellites—the stars in the binary systems—the solar system itself, were performing their daily, their annual, and their secular movements unseen, unheeded, and fulfilling no purpose that human reason can conceive; lamps lighting nothing—fires heating nothing—waters quenching nothing—clouds screening nothing—breezes fanning nothing—and everything around, mountain and valley, hill and dale, earth and ocean, all meaning nothing. ‘The stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space.’ To our apprehension, such a condition of the earth, of the solar system, and of the sidereal universe, would be the same as that of our own globe if all its vessels of war and of commerce were traversing its seas with empty cabins and freightless holds; as if all the railways on its surface were in full activity without passengers and goods; and all our machinery beating the air and gnashing their iron teeth without work performed. A house without tenants, a city without citizens, present to our minds the same idea as a planet without life, and a universe without inhabitants. Why the house was built, why the city was founded, why the planet was made, and why the universe was created, it would be difficult even to conjecture. Equally great would be the difficulty were the planets shapeless lumps of matter, poised in ether, and still and motionless as the grave. But when we consider them as chiselled spheres, and teeming with inorganic beauty, and in full mechanical activity, performing their appointed motions with such miraculous precision that their days and their years never err a second of time in hundreds of centuries, the difficulty of believing them to be without life is, if possible, immeasurably increased. To conceive any one material globe, whether a gigantic clod slumbering in space, or a noble planet equipped like our own, and duly performing its appointed task, to have no living occupants, or not in a state of preparation to receive them, seems to us one of those notions which could be harboured only in an ill-educated and ill-regulated mind—a