Busy, hurrying Mercury! we must meet him first in his wild rush through space. If he were to slacken speed for a single instant, he would begin to fall with fearful rapidity towards the sun. And if Mercury were to drop into one of those huge black chasms of rent furnace-flame on the sun’s surface, there would be a speedy end to his life as a planet. Mercury’s day is about the same length as our day, and his year is about one quarter the length of our year. If Mercury has spring, summer, autumn, and winter, each season must be extremely short; but this depends upon whether Mercury’s axis slopes like the earth’s axis--a matter difficult to find out. Mercury is always so near to the sun, that it is by no means easy to observe him well. We know more about his orbit than his axis. The earth’s orbit, as before explained, is not a circle, but an ellipse or oval. Mercury’s orbit is an ellipse also, and a much longer--or, as it is called, a more eccentric--ellipse. The earth is three millions of miles nearer to the sun at one time of the year, than six months before or after. Mercury is no less than fifteen millions of miles nearer at one time than another, which must make a marked difference in the amount of heat received. Even when the distance is greatest, the sun as seen from Mercury looks four and a half times as large as the sun we see. What a blazing splendor of light! It is not easy to imagine human beings living there, in such heat and glare, and with either no changes of season at all, or such very short seasons rapidly following one another. Mercury may, and very likely does, abound with living creatures, as much as the earth abounds with them; only one fancies they must be altogether a different kind of living creatures from any ever seen on earth. And yet we do not know. Man can so wonderfully adapt himself or be adapted to different climates on earth, from extreme heat to extreme cold, that we can not tell how far this adapting power may reach. Both Mercury and Venus seem to be enfolded in dense, cloud-laden atmospheres, rarely parting so as to allow us to get even a glimpse of the real planets within the thick, light-reflecting covering. Some have thought that a heavy, moist, protecting atmosphere may help to ward off the intense heat, and to make Mercury a more habitable place. Our earthly atmosphere is rather of a kind to store up heat, and to make us warmer than we should be without it; but there might be vapors differently constituted which might act in some other way. At all events, we know how easily God can have adapted either the planet to the creatures he meant to place there, or the creatures to the climate. “All things are possible” to him. The how and the what are interesting questions for us, but we must often be content to wait for an answer.