The inferences drawn from a careful study of the condition of our own globe are in favour of the assumption of the existence of nebulous matter. By the processes of art and manufacture, by the operation of those powers on which organisation and life depend, solid matter is constantly poured off in such a state that it cannot be detected, _as matter_, by any of the human senses. Yet a thousand results, daily and hourly accumulating as truths around us, prove that the solid metals, the gross earths, and the constituents of animal and vegetable life, all pass away invisible to us, and become “thin air.” We know that, floating around us, these volatilized bodies exist in some material form, and numerous experiments in chemistry are calculated to convince us, that the most attenuated air is capable, with a slight change of circumstances, of being converted into the condition of solid masses. Hydrogen gas, the lightest, the most ethereal of the chemical elements, dissolves iron and zinc, arsenic, sulphur, and carbon; and from the transparent combinations thus formed, we can with facility separate those ponderous bodies. Such substances must exist in our own atmosphere; why not in the regions of space? Whether this planet ever floated a mass of nebulous matter, only known by its dim and filmy light, or comet-like rushed through space with widely eccentric orbit, are questions which can only receive the reply of speculative minds. Whether the earth and the other members of the Solar System were ever parts of a Central Sun,[18] and thrown from it by some mighty convulsion, though now revolving with all the other masses around that orb, chained in their circuits by some infinite power, is beyond the utmost refinements of science to discover. This hypothesis is, however, in its sublime conception, worthy of the master-mind that gave it birth. All we know is, that our earth is an oblate sphere, which, by the effects of its rotation around an axis, is somewhat enlarged at the equator and flattened at the poles;--that it maintains its regular course around the sun, in virtue of the operation of two forces, one of which, acting constantly, would eventually draw it into the body of the sun itself; but that it is opposed by the other, centrifugal force, and the varying momentum of the revolving mass;--that the same force acting from the centre of the earth itself, and from the centre of every particle of its substance, resolves the whole into a globular form.