Emanating from the _middle_ planet of the system.” ——The _earth_ the _middle_ planet of the system? How is this? In an earlier portion of his book (p. 56), Sir David had demonstrated that “our earth is neither the _middle_ [his own italics] planet, nor the planet _nearest_ the sun, nor the planet furthest from that luminary: that therefore the earth, as a planet, has no pre-eminence in the solar system, to induce us to believe that it is the only inhabited world.... _Jupiter_ is the _middle_ planet (p. 55), and is otherwise highly distinguished!” How is this? Can the two passages containing such direct contradictions have emanated from the same _scientific_ controversialist?—To resume, however: —“Emanating from the middle planet of the system, why may it not have _extended to them all_, ... to the Planetary Races in the Past, and to the Planetary Races in the Future?... But to bring our argument more within the reach of an ordinary understanding”—he supposes our earth split into two parts! the old world and the new (as Biela’s comet is supposed to have been divided in 1846), at the beginning of the Christian era![56]—“would not _both fragments_ have shared in the beneficence of the Cross—the penitent on the shores of the Mississippi, as richly as the pilgrim on the banks of the Jordan?... Should this view prove unsatisfactory to the anxious inquirer, we may suggest another sentiment, even though we ourselves may not admit it into our creed.... May not the Divine Nature, which can neither suffer, nor die, and which, in our planet, _once_ only clothed itself in humanity, _resume elsewhere a physical form, and expiate the guilt of unnumbered worlds_?”[57] We repeat, that we abstain from offering any of the stern strictures which these passages almost extort from us. He proceeds to declare himself incompetent to comprehend the Difficulty “put in a form so unintelligible” by the Essayist—that of a kind of existence, similar to that of men, in respect of their intellectual, moral, and spiritual character, and its _progressive_ development, existing in any region occupied by other beings than man. He denies that Progression has been the character of the history of man,[58] but rather frequent and vast retrogressions ever since the Fall; and asks “which of these ever-changing conditions of humanity is the _unique_ condition of the Essayist—incapable of repetition in the scheme of the Universe?”[59] Why may there not be an intermediate race between that of man and the angelic beings of Scripture, where human reason shall pass into the highest form of created mind, and human affections into their noblest development?—