Thus has the falling of the meteoric stone, the minute remnant of processes which seems to have played an important part in the formation of the heavenly bodies, conducted us to the present time, where we pass from the darkness of hypothetical views to the brightness of knowledge. In what we have said, however, all that is hypothetical is the assumption of Kant and Laplace, that the masses of our system were once distributed as nebulæ in space. On account of the rarity of the case, we will still further remark, in what close coincidence the results of science here stand with the earlier legends of the human family, and the forebodings of poetic fancy. The cosmogony of ancient nations generally commences with chaos and darkness. Neither is the Mosaic tradition very divergent, particularly when we remember that that which Moses names heaven is different from the blue dome above us, and is synonymous with space, and that the unformed earth, and the waters of the great deep, which were afterwards divided into waters above the firmament, and waters below the firmament, resembled the chaotic components of the world. Our earth bears still the unmistakable traces of its old fiery fluid condition. The granite formations of her mountains exhibit a structure, which can only be produced by the crystallization of fused masses. Investigation still shows that the temperature in mines, and borings, increases as we descend; and if this increase is uniform, at the depth of fifty miles, a heat exists sufficient to fuse all our minerals. Even now our volcanoes project, from time to time, mighty masses of fused rocks from their interior, as a testimony of the heat which exists there. But the cooled crust of the earth has already become so thick, that, as may be shown by calculations of its conductive power, the heat coming to the surface from within, in comparison with that reaching the earth from the sun, is exceedingly small, and increases the temperature of the surface only about one-thirtieth of a degree centigrade; so that the remnant of the old store of force which is enclosed as heat within the bowels of the earth, has a sensible influence upon the processes at the earth’s surface, only through the instrumentality of volcanic phenomena. These processes owe their power almost wholly to the action of other heavenly bodies, particularly to the light and heat of the sun, and partly also, in the case of the tides, to the attraction of the sun and moon.