compensation. Thus there may be upon the whole a nearly equal
experience of heat amongst all these children of the sun. Where,
meanwhile, is the heat once diffused through the system over and
above what remains in the planets? May we not rationally presume it
to have gone to constitute that luminous envelope of the sun, in
which his warmth-giving power is now held to reside? It could not be
destroyed--it cannot be supposed to have gone off into space--it must
have simply been reserved to constitute, at the last, a means of
sustaining the many operations of which the planets were destined to
be the theatre.

The tendency of the whole of the preceding considerations is to bring
the conviction that our globe is a specimen of all the similarly-
placed bodies of space, as respects its constituent matter and the
physical and chemical laws governing it, with only this
qualification, that there are POSSIBLY shades of variation with
respect to the component materials, and UNDOUBTEDLY with respect to
the conditions under which the laws operate, and consequently the
effects which they produce. Thus, there may be substances here which
are not in some other bodies, and substances here solid may be
elsewhere liquid or vaporiform. We are the more entitled to draw
such conclusions, seeing that there is nothing at all singular or
special in the astronomical situation of the earth. It takes its
place third in a series of planets, which series is only one of
numberless other systems forming one group. It is strikingly--if I
may use such an expression--a member of a democracy. Hence, we
cannot suppose that there is any peculiarity about it which does not
probably attach to multitudes of other bodies--in fact, to all that
are analogous to it in respect of cosmical arrangements.