So human beings exist in successive generations. One generation passeth away, and another cometh, and so the race lives on. While alike in their power of assimilation and reproduction, there is a wide difference between the vegetable and the animal. They have not the same organs, and do not subsist on the same food. The plant is constantly consuming carbonic acid, and giving out oxygen, while animals consume the oxygen, and restore to the atmosphere carbonic acid. The difference of their physical structure, and their different relations to inorganic matter, suggest a wide difference in the “bios” or life, that animates them. Just what that difference is, no one can tell. It is a question for which science furnishes no answer. In his physical organization man differs but little from the lower animals. In this he is brother to the beasts that perish, having the same nature, needs, and liabilities. If he is “fearfully and wonderfully made,” so are they; in agility and strength many of them far surpass him. His peculiarities of form and structure do not secure, and, it may be safely said, were not intended to secure physical superiority, but rather to fit the organization for the indwelling of the rational soul, that is his distinguishing characteristic. PHYSICAL ASTRONOMY Has been made the subject of much diligent research and study. Some facts respecting the physical elements and structure of the sun and planets have been ascertained with reasonable certainty, but much is still in doubt. Assuming that the essential properties of matter are the same everywhere, we may tell with assurance of what the sun and stars are made, provided all solar and stellar phenomena are explained by physical laws that are understood, and in operation around us. This has been done in part, but not so as to harmonize the views of all astronomers. Since the use of the spectroscope[5] results have been more satisfactory, and on some questions of much interest, conjecture and theory have given place to certainty. By the decomposition of sunbeams or pencils of solar light, the refracted rays show the presence of several distinct chemical elements. Finding by a qualitative analysis that there is iron, copper, zinc, nickel, sodium, and other terrestrial substances in the solar and stellar spectra, we know that they enter into the composition of those celestial bodies. But in what proportions or combinations they exist is not known. METEOROLOGY AND AEROLITES.