Page:Gods Glory in the Heavens.djvu/47

Rh the moon be made in this way, he will be able to understand, much more readily, the revelations of the telescope.

As soon as we get a glimpse of the mountain ranges, volcanic craters, and vast plains of our satellite, the natural inquiry is—Is it inhabited? There is a sufficient general resemblance, at the first glance, to prompt the inquiry; but—Does minuter inspection countenance the hypothesis? We have not the more obvious proofs of habitableness. We do not find cities with ramifying streets, or such diversities of colour as would indicate cultivated districts, though we have telescopic power to discover such traces if they existed. If peopled with beings like ourselves, we might naturally expect single buildings, which would be quite discernible by the telescope; for, in the moon, blocks of stone could be raised by one man, that would require, in this globe, the united energies of six. Here, structures are very limited in magnitude by the tendency of the weight to crush the stone; but, there, from the lightness of the materials, the range would be much wider. No such buildings, however, no trace of cities, no proofs that the soil has been disturbed by the plough, or that yellow harvests alternate with green fields, have been discovered.

There is no necessity, however, that the inhabitants should be after the type of man's bodily constitution; we can conceive intellect united to a very different corporeal organisation; and we know that there is a