axiom of a very high and universal kind, and has been raised by a succession of inductions and abstractions drawn from the observation of numerous facts and subordinate laws in the planetary system. When this law is taken for granted, and laid down as a basis of reasoning, and applied to the actual condition of our own planet, one of the consequences to which it leads is, that the earth, instead of being an exact sphere, must be compressed or flattened in the direction of its polar diameter, the one diameter being about thirty miles shorter than the other; and this conclusion, deduced at first by mere reasoning, has been since found to be true in fact. All astronomical predictions are examples of the same thing. (89.) In the important business of raising these axioms of nature, we are not, as in the analysis of phenomena, left wholly without a guide. The nature of abstract or general reasoning points out in a great measure the course we must pursue. A law of nature, being the statement of what will happen in certain general contingencies, may be regarded as the announcement, in the same words, of a whole group or class of phenomena. Whenever, therefore, we perceive that two or more phenomena agree in so many or so remarkable points, as to lead us to regard them as forming a class or group, if we lay out of consideration, or _abstract_, all the circumstances in which they disagree, and retain in our minds those only in which they agree, and then, under this kind of mental convention, frame a definition or statement of one of them, in such words that it shall apply equally to them all, such statement will appear in the form of a general proposition, having so far at least the character of a law of nature.