and we know that the Creator "telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names."* Hence, the most solitary star discovered by astronomers on the remotest verge of the visible universe is registered in the catalogues of heaven, and it may be placed like a watchman at an outpost in the illimitable field of the divine operations. The conclusion from this reasoning is, that the arrangement of the numberless stars in clusters, as they appear to man on the earth, was planned and designed for wise purposes in the grand scheme of creation. The arrangement as seen by the human eye appears perfectly confused, but order and symmetry emerge from the seeming disorder, and navigators can find their course for months with the utmost precision all over the ocean, partly guided by a few stars which, at first sight, would appear to have been launched by chance into space. Certain stars are named and registered in nautical tables, and from the meridian altitude of a known star, or from the altitudes of two stars, the latitude of a ship may be found. The Pole star of the north was doubtless anxiously looked out for by Noah when he opened the windows of the ark; and before the discovery of the mariner's compass, it was the fixed point which cheered and guided the seaman in all his voyages.

It is a striking fact, illustrative of the accuracy of geometrical principles in the arrangements of the stars in clusters for the benefit of man on the ocean, that voyagers proceeding to the southward, on losing sight of the Polar star, find in the beautiful constellation of the Cross a mysterious guide in that region of the globe.

The constellations of the Ursa Major in the north, * Psalm cxlvii. 4.

and the Cross in the south, stand on the celestial sphere, towards the respective poles of the earth, nearly at equal distances.

It is since the discovery of America by the experienced and intrepid Columbus and his navigators, that the constellation of the Southern Cross has acquired that peculiar character arising from the religious feeling of Christian mariners and missionaries. Previous to that period the four remarkable stars were regarded as parts of the constellation of the Centaur, and thus lost their striking individuality. There is something deeply interesting in the contemplation of that cluster of stars in the resplendent sign which they form in the heavens. They are stars of the first magnitude, or nearly so, and, seen in the clear atmosphere, they have attracted notice since the earliest ages. Humboldt, in his "Cosmos," gives a history of those celebrated stars as far as it is known from astronomical calculations; but the result is so extraordinary as to leave on the mind a doubt of the accuracy of the details. It appears, from what he says, that in the time of Ptolemy, the Egyptian astronomer and geographer, about the first half of the second century, the star which forms the base of the Cross had at its meridian passage at Alexandria an altitude of 6° 10′, whilst in the present day it culminates at Alexandria several degrees below the horizon. Alexandria is in north latitude 31° 11'. This is a retrocession of about ten degrees to the south since the second century of the Christian era. He further says, that the Southern Cross began to become invisible in 52° 30′ north latitude 2900 years before our era. This remarkable calculation he gives on the authority of Dr. Galle, who had ascertained that the proper motion of the base star of the constel*Humboldt's "Cosmos."

lation is about one-third of a second annually. This is the effect of the precession of the equinoxes under which the starry heavens are slowly changing their aspect from every portion of the earth's surface. The Southern Cross forms a sidereal clock to the inhabitants of that region of the earth, for as the stars at the base and the top have almost the same right ascension, the Cross appears perpendicular when passing the meridian, and thus marks the time. Humboldt, the most philosophical and picturesque describer of nature, in travelling by night over the great plains of South America, says that he was always struck with the remark by his servants and muleteers," It is past midnight, the Cross begins to bend." Every person who has visited the countries or seen the constellations described by Humboldt must bear testimony to the accuracy of that scientific explorer.

A writer on the romance of nature asserts that "the nebulous matter of space, previously to the formation of stellar and planetary bodies, must have been a universal fire-mist, an idea which we can scarcely comprehend. The formation of systems out of this matter, implies a change of some kind with regard to the condition of heat. Had this power continued to act with its full original repulsive energy, the process of agglomeration by attraction could not have gone We do not know enough of the laws of heat to enable us to surmise how the necessary change in this respect was brought about; but we can trace some of the steps and consequences of the process. Uranus would be formed at the time when the heat of our system's matter was at the greatest. Saturn at the next, and so on."*

on.

No limit can be assigned to the imagination of a man when it indites romances of the

* "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation."

universe, and the author of "The Vestiges of Creation" has shown the possession of imaginative powers competent to explain on what the tortoise rests on whose back the Hindu world is upheld!

In his account of the origin of man, he loses his way in the fogs of the swamp, as effectually as he does in the fire-mists of the universe, to discover the creation of those bright orbs which shed their light on the earth, and guide the navigator to his home. But there is a quiet irony that appears in his speculations on the origin and transmigration of man from the frog through the Simiada, terminating in the Primates, which makes them amusing, and partly does away with the disgust which such an imputed ancestry of the human race raises in the mind of the reader.

We have been led into this cursory notice of "The Vestiges of Creation" by the curious speculations on the formation of the astral bodies, and we will dismiss them with the following extract from the prayer of Solomon, given in the apocryphal Book of Wisdom: "The corruptible body is a load upon the soul, and the earthly habitation presseth down the mind that museth upon many things. And hardly do we guess aright at things that are upon earth, and with labour do we find the things that are before us. But the things that are in heaven, who shall search out?"*

It was not by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, or by a conglomeration of fire-mist whirled into stars, that the universe assumed the splendours which we now behold; but for the origin we must go back to that dawn of eternity when "the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy." There is an assurance in the scriptural history of creation that everything was designed and measured, and a line * Wisdom, ix. 15, 16. + Job xxxviii. 7.

actually stretched as a standard of measurement for the heavens and the earth. The very order of creation was arranged, and the discoveries and calculations of astronomers in the present time confirm, in the most striking manner, the amazing accuracy of the original plans. Sir John Herschel records the fact that "the sidereal day has not changed by so much as one-hundredth of a second since the time of Hipparchus, a period of two thousand years." From all this we may safely infer, that the arrangement of the sign of the cross among the stars was settled from the beginning, and, for purposes only known to the mind of the Creator, the background is studded with coloured lights of RED, GREEN, and BLUE, "giving to the whole the appearance of a rich piece of jewellery." +

NOTE.

The author of these pages lived for several years in the southern hemisphere, and he wrote the foregoing chapter from the reminiscences of the glorious scenery of that district of the heavens. Although he again visited that region of the world, and made the circumnavigation of the earth by the routes of the isthmus of Suez and the isthmus of Panama, in the year 1853, he has retained the text unchanged, and he will reserve for another account the observations which he made on that interesting voyage. But he cannot allow this opportunity to pass without recording here, that he passed the night of the 30-31 August, 1853, in S. lat. 36° 22′, and W. lon. 165° 10′, on deck, to observe the constellation of the Cross in its rotation round the South Pole of the earth. Taking the South Pole as the centre, the radius of the circle round which the Cross revolved was about thirty degrees. At two o'clock A.M. of 31st August it was at the lowest point, which it turned within 24° and 3° of the horizon, and in less than half an hour the angle was visibly

*Herschel's "Outlines," p. 623.

+ Ibid. p. 597.