Without attempting to say how far the study of the existing Constitutions of France and Germany, America and Australia, Turkey and India, Morocco and Fiji, might be justly used to supersede the study of English history, it may at least be urged that if we had no annals from which history could be compiled it might be instructive to employ such a substitute for historical studies as is here suggested. This is, indeed, the course which we are compelled to take in our study of that great chapter in earth-history which we are discussing in these pages. It is obvious from the nature of the case that it can never be possible for us to obtain direct testimony as to what occurred in the bringing together of the materials of this globe. We must, therefore, look abroad through the universe, and see whether we can find, from the study of other systems at present in various stages of their evolution, illustrations of the incidents which we may presume to have occurred in the early stages of our own history. If Kant had never lived, if Laplace had never announced his Nebular Theory, if the discoveries of Sir William Herschel had not been made, I still venture to think that a due consideration of the remarkable photograph of the famous Great Spiral, which was obtained at the famous Lick Observatory in California, would have suggested the high probability of that doctrine which we describe as the Nebular Theory. [Illustration: Fig. 28.—THE GREAT SPIRAL NEBULA (Lick Observatory). (_From the Royal Astronomical Series._)] If an artist thoroughly versed in the great facts of astronomy had been commissioned to represent the nebular origin of our system as perfectly as a highly cultivated yet disciplined imagination would permit, I do not think he could have designed anything which could answer the purpose more perfectly than does that picture which is now before us. We might wish indeed that Kant and Laplace and Herschel could have lived to see this marvellous natural illustration of their views, for photographs were of course unthought of in those days, and, I need hardly say, that for any one celestial nebula that could have been known in the times of Laplace, hundreds are now within the reach of astronomers.