which there are winds hot and cold, clouds compact or dissolving,--be an arrangement which extends its influence to other planets, as well as to ours;--if this mixed atmosphere be placed, not only at the meeting point of clear aqueous vapor above, and warmer airs below, but also at the meeting point of a hot central region surrounding the Sun, and a cold exterior zone in which water and vapor can exist in immense collected masses, such as are Jupiter and Saturn;--still it would not appear, to a reasonable view, that this larger expansion of the machinery by which the effect is produced, makes the machinery less remarkable; or can at all tend to diminish the belief that it was _intended_ to produce the effect which it does produce. Hot and cold, moist and dry, are constantly mixed together for the support of vegetable and animal life; and not the less so, if we believe that, though elements of this kind pervade the whole solar system, it is only at the Earth that they are combined so as to foster and nourish living things. 7. But it will perhaps be said, that to suppose the whole Solar System to be a machine merely operating for the benefit of the Earth and its population, is to give to the Earth and its population an importance in the scheme of creation which is quite extravagant and improbable:--it is to make the greater orbs, Jupiter and Saturn, minister to the less; instead of having their own purpose, and their own population, which their size naturally leads us to expect. To this we reply, that, in the first place, we have shown good reason for believing that the Earth is really the largest dense solid globe which exists in the solar system, and that the size of Jupiter and Saturn arises from their being composed mainly of water and vapor. And with regard to the difficulty of the greater ministering to the less;--if by _greater_, mere size and extent be understood, it appears to be the universal law of creation, that the greater, in that sense, _should_ minister to the less, when the less includes living things. Even if the planets be all inhabited, the sun, which is greater far than all of them together, ministers light and heat to all of them. Even on this supposition, the vast spaces by which the planets are separated have no use, that we can discern, except to place them at suitable distances from the sun. Even on this supposition, their solid globes within, their atmospheres without are all merely subservient to the benefit of a thin and scattered population on the surface. The space occupied by men and animals on the earth's surface, even taking into account the highest buildings and the deepest seas, is only a few hundreds, or a thousand feet. The benefit of this minute shell, interrupted in many places for vast distances, everywhere loosely and sparsely filled, is ministered to by the solidity and attraction of a mass below it 20 millions of feet deep; by the influence of an