bited, launched into an orbit of immeasurable circuit, and wheeling through ether with the velocity of fifty-seven miles in a second, may have some resemblance to a mighty autocrat, who should establish a railway round the coasts of Europe and Asia, and place upon it an enormous train of firstclass carriages, impelled year after year by tremendous steam-power, while there was but a philosopher and a culprit in a humble van, attended by hundreds of unoccupied carriages and empty trucks!'

Here is a mystery. We are sorry that our efforts to divine the entire solution of this allegory have not been crowned with success; but the Emperor of Russia, the Master of a large College, and the Vice-President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, would seem to be parties to the plot.

We take our leave of Sir David Brewster's work with a very acute feeling of disappointment. We are sorry to find so very famous a man condescend to employ rhodomontade and bad reasoning on so very interesting a theme. We are the more sorry, because we feel that such an answer to so able (though we trust we have shown not immaculate) a work as his opponent's, cannot but weaken the cause which we ourselves incline to support. To Sir David, an advocate of a plurality of worlds may well exclaim, Save me from my friends!' Would that the author of the Essay had been writing on the opposite side! We should gladly have hailed so able and ingenious a thinker as an advocate instead of an opponent of a plurality of worlds. His immense information, his enormous capacity, his store of able if not profound thought, would have made him an irresistible pleader on a better cause than he has chosen. With the ingenuity which, in his present work, he exhibits-devós Tís éσTI θέσεις διαφυλάττειν — he could easily have made the better appear the better cause. Nor are we aware that his habits of thought, as previously exhibited, would in any wise have unfitted him for such an advocacy. One, who, if we mistake not, is not entirely dissimilar from him in his antecedents, ably argues :1

The earth, the globular body thus covered with life, is not the only globe in the universe. There are circling about our own sun six others, as far as we can judge, perfectly analogous in their nature, besides our moon and other bodies analogous to it. No one can resist the temptation to conjecture that these globes, some of them much larger than our own, are not dead and barren; that they are, like ours, occupied with organization, life, intelligence. To conjecture is all that we can do; yet even by the percep tion of such a possibility, our view of the kingdom of nature is enlarged and elevated.'

Yes, to conjecture is all we can do; and we shall perhaps

1 Dr. Whewell, Bridgewater Treatise, p. 269.

never attain a nobler or more enviable spirit than that of the child's poem-for a Poem it is:

But if we cannot be content with grateful and admiring awe; if we must conjecture, let our conjectures be directed in the most natural, the most philosophical, the most religious course. We have scarcely done more than indicate in these pages which we conceive to be that tendency, but it is one which, to us at least, seems irresistible. We are at best children

disporting themselves on the margin of truth's ocean, picking up here a pebble and there a shell, but ignorant of all that lies beyond. Yet it would be unwise to conclude that our shores and our shoals alone are tenanted with these beauteous creations, while the islands which appear to stud that ocean, and all its prodigious depths, are destitute of the activity that displays itself with us. We cannot forbear from quoting the beautiful and devout language of our own sweet psalmist :

"More and more stars! and ever as I gaze
Brighter and brighter seen!

Whence came they, Father? trace me out their ways
Far in the deep serene."

My child, these eyes of mine but faintly show

One step on earth below:

And even our wisest may but dream, they say,

Of what is done on high, by yon empyreal ray.

But surely of yon lamps on high we deem

As of pure worlds, whereon the floods of mercy stream

Yea, in each keen heart-thrilling glance of theirs

Of other stars we read;

Stars out of sight, souls for whom love prepares
A portion and a meed

In the supernal Heavens for evermore,

When sun and moon are o'er;

Fixed in the deep of grace and song, as these

In the blue skies, and o'er the far-resounding seas.

*

More and more stars! behold yon hazy arch
Spanning the vault on high,

By planets traversed in majestic march,
Seeming to earth's dull eye

A vault of gleaming air: but take thou wing

Of faith, and upward spring:

Into a thousand stars the misty light

Will part; each star a world with its own day and night.

1 Lyra Innocentium. The Starry Heavens.

NO. LXXXVII.-N.S.

G

ART. III.-1. Ueber das Verhaltniss des Islams zum Evangelium. Von DR. J. A. MÖHLER. Ed. DÖLLINGER. Regensburg.

1839.

2. Essai sur l'Histoire des Arabes avant l'Islamisme, pendant Epoque de Mahomet, et jusqu'à la réduction de toutes les tribus sous la loi Musulmane. Par A. P. CAUSSIN DE PERCEVAL, Professeur d'Arabe au Collège de France, &c. Tomes 3. Paris: Didot Frères. 1847-48.

3. Mahomet et les Origines de l'Islamisme.

Par M. ERNEST RENAN. Revue des deux Mondes. Paris. 1851. Tome xii. p. 1063.

4. Lettres sur la Turquie, ou Tableau Statistique de l'Empire Ottoman. Par M. A. UBICINI. Première Partie. Les Ottomans. Deuxième Edition. Paris. 1853.

5. Lives of Mahomet and his Successors. By WASHINGTON IRVING. New York and London. 1850.

6. History of Arabia and its People. By ANDREW CHRICHTON, LL.D. New Edition. London and Edinburgh: Nelson and Sons.

7. Lectures on the History of the Turks in its Relation to Christianity. By the Author of Loss and Gain. Dublin. 1854.

IF, gazing upon the shelves of a well-stocked modern library, we should observe a large and increasing proportion of volumes, which, more or less directly, bore reference to the person and the creed of Mahomet; and if, further, we were informed that their general tendency was more favourable to the Arabian teacher than were, for the most part, those of an earlier age; the first and most obvious mode of accounting for this circumstance would be the existence of the War in the East. Nor indeed would it be difficult to point out many volumes, for whose tone and for whose very appearance our new armed alliance would sufficiently account. But this solution would before long find its limit. After glancing at the contents of numberless books of travel, and of biographical and historical sketches, professing to throw light upon the all-absorbing topic of the day, we should arrive by a retrograde course at rows of volumes upon the same theme, prior in point of time to the outbreak, or even the expectation, of the present war, yet often partaking of the same lenient tone in all that respects Mahomet

Not otherwise of yonder Saintly host

Upon the glorious shore

Deem thou. He marks them all; not one is lost;
By name He counts them o'er.

Full many a soul, to man's dim praise unknown,
May on its glory-throne

As brightly shine, and prove as strong in prayer

As theirs whose separate beams shoot keenest through this air.' Such is the poet's expansion of the ancient and most sure promise, when the patriarch, the father of the faithful, looked towards heaven and failed to number the stars, So shall thy seed be!' And this, we must confess, is a philosophy with which we would rather err, than be bereft of its noble and lofty imaginings, for the sake of fanciful speculations concerning the constitution of granulated nebula and curdled lumps of light.' Let truth be paramount everywhere, and in all cases; let science demand our hearty assent to all she has to teach; but, while we are precluded from bringing positive science to bear on such a theme, while probability and balanced analogies are all our resource, we are Îoth to be robbed of such ideas as have animated and comforted the breasts of men like Bentley, Isaac Taylor, Chalmers, and Whewell, in past time. We have the fullest conviction that every advance made in physical knowledge will afford fresh matter for reverential and grateful thought. We do not, therefore, check the march of intellect, and the progress of certainty and truth. But, while speculation only can be applied to the subject, we cannot prevail upon ourselves to abandon the strong analogies which seem to tell us that there is a sweet harmony in the eternal heavens, in which the discords of our own life shall be finally resolved in such a pulse of symphony as man hath not heard nor in his heart conceived; that there is some centre of the universe whence the relations, and attributes, and mysteries of existence shall assume a glorious symmetry and proportion; that, for the moral and intellectual, not less than for the material scheme of things, we dare cherish no Ptolemaic theory ;-that our earth is but a speck in God's wide, wide world.