[7] “According to the Pythagoreans and Platonists, there is a life infused throughout all things ... an intellectual and artificial fire--an inward principle, animal spirit, or natural life, producing or forming within, as art doth without--regulating, moderating, and reconciling the various motions, qualities, and parts of the mundane system. By virtue of this life, the great masses are held together in their ordinary courses, as well as the minutest particles governed in their natural motions, according to the several laws of attraction, gravity, electricity, magnetism, and the rest. It is this gives instincts, teaches the spider her web, and the bee her honey;--this it is that directs the roots of plants to draw forth juice from the earth, and the leaves and the cortical vessels to separate and attract such particles of air and elementary fire as suit their respective natures.”--Bishop Berkeley, _Siris_, No. 277. [8] “The revolution of the earth is performed in a natural day, or, more strictly speaking, once in 23h. 56' 4", and as its mean circumference is 24,871 miles, it follows that any point in its equatorial surface has a rotatory motion of more than 1,000 miles per hour. This velocity must gradually diminish to nothing at either pole. Whilst the earth is thus revolving on its axis, it has a progressive motion in its orbit. If we take the length of the earth’s orbit at 630,000,000, its motion through space must exceed 68,490 miles in the hour.”--Enc. Brit. art. _Physical Geography_. [9] “Here then we have the splendid result of the united studies of MM. Argelander, O. Struve, and Peters, grounded on observations made at the three observatories of Dorpat, Abo, Pulkova, and which is expressed in the following thesis:--The motion of the solar system in space is directed to a point of the celestial vault situated on the right line which joins the two stars π and μ _Herculis_, at a quarter of the apparent distance of these stars, reckoning from π _Herculis_. The velocity of this motion is such, that the sun, with all the bodies which depend upon it, advances annually in the above direction 1·623 times the radius of the earth’s orbit, or 33,550,000 geographical miles. The possible error of this last number amounts to 1,733,000 geographical miles, or to a _seventh_ of the whole value. We may then wager 400,000 to 1 that the sun has a proper progressive motion, and 1 to 1 that it is comprised between the limits of thirty-eight and twenty-nine millions of geographical miles.”--_Etudes d’Astronomie Stellaire: Sur la Voie Lactée et sur les Distances des Etoiles Fixes_: M. F. W. G. Struve. [A report addressed to his Excellency M. Le Comte Ouvaroff; Minister of Public Instruction and President of the Imperial Academy of Sciences at St. Petersburg.]