Page:A discovery that the moon has a vast population of human beings.djvu/64

 and above all that is visible to man, there may lie fields of creation which sweep immeasurably along, and carry the impress of the Almigbty's hand to the remotest scenes of the universe. The other suggests to me, that within and beneath all that minuteness which the aided eye of man has been able to explore, there may lie a region of invisibles; and that could we draw aside the mysterious curtain which shrouds it from our senses, wo might there see a theatre of as many wonders as astronomy has unfolded; a universe within the compass of a point so small, as to elude all the powers of the microscope, but where the wonder-working God finds room for the exercise of all bis attributes, wbere he can raise another mechanism of worlds, and fill and animate them all with the evidences of his glory."

Opinions of the American Press Respecting the Foregoing Discovery.

"—We are too much pleased with the remarks of the sensible, candid, and scientific portions of the public press upon the extracts which we have published relative to these wonders of the age, to direct our attention very severely to-day to that sceptical class of our cotemporaries to whom none of these attributes can be ascribed. Consummate ignorance is always incredulous to the higher order of scientific discoveries, because it cannot possibly comprehend them. Its mental thorax is quite capacious enough to swallow any dogmas, however great, that are given upon the authority of names; but it strains most perilously to receive the great truths of reason and science. We scarcely ever knew a very ignorant person who would believe in the existence of those myriads of invisible beings which inhabit a drop of water, and every grain of dust, until he bad actually beheld them through the microscope by which they are developed. Yet these very persons will readily believe in the divinity of Matthias the prophet, and in the most improbable credenda of extravagant systems of faith. The Journal of Commerce, for instance, says it cannot believe in these great discoveries of Dr. Herschel, yet it believes and defends the innocence of the murderer Avery. These who in a former age imprisoned Galileo for asserting his great discoveries with the telescope, and determined upon sentencing him to be burnt alive, nevertheless believed that Simon Magus actually flew in the air by the aid of the devil, and that when that