Let us now, would say our Essayist, proceed on our negative tour, so to speak, and hasten to pay our respects to the Moon, our nearest neighbour, and whose distance from the Sun is admitted to adapt her, so far, for habitation.[72] If it appear, by strong evidence, that the Moon is not inhabited, then there is an end of the general principle, that _all_ the bodies of the solar system are inhabited, and that we must begin our speculation about each with this assumption. If the Moon be not inhabited, then, it would seem, the belief that each special body in the system _is_ inhabited, must depend upon reasons specially belonging to that body, and cannot be taken for granted without these reasons.[73] Now, as to the Moon, we have latterly acquired the means of making such exact and minute inquiries, that at the meeting of the British Association at Hull last year, Mr Phillips, an eminent geologist, stated that astronomers can discern the shape of a spot on the Moon’s surface, only a few hundred feet in breadth. Passing by, however, the Essayist’s brief but able account of the physical condition of this satellite of ours, we will cite the recent testimony of one accredited by Sir David Brewster[74] as “a mathematician and a natural philosopher, who has studied, more than any preceding writer, the analogies between the Earth and the other planets”—Dr Lardner, who, in the third volume (published since our last Number appeared) of the work placed at the head of this article, thus concludes his elaborate account of the Moon, as now regarded by the most enlightened astronomers—after proving it to be “as exempt from an atmosphere as is the utterly exhausted receiver of a good air-pump!” “In fine, the entire geographical character of the moon, thus ascertained by long-continued and exact telescopic surveys, leads to the conclusion, that no analogy exists between it and the earth which could confer any probability on the conjecture that it fulfils the same purposes in the economy of the universe; and we must infer, that whatever be its uses in the solar system, or in the general purposes of creation, it is not a world inhabited by organised races such as those to which the earth is appropriated.”[75]