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THE earth, out of the dust of which man was originally formed, the scene of our joys and our sorrows during life, and the receptacle of our remains when its brief measure is run out, and the heavens, which are spread over us as a dome of the most stupendous magnitude and the most lively colour, lighted up by the glories of the sun during the day, and glittering with the countless myriads of the starry host during night, and beyond which every good man hopes to find an everlasting abode, when the earth shall have gone into oblivion, and all its history been forgotten, are subjects to which even the most incurious of the human species cannot remain indifferent. When we contemplate them, even with the uninformed eye of nature, they speak a language, and tell a tale, which no where have a parallel. Of their extent we can conceive no boundary, and of their duration we can, of ourselves, understand neither the beginning nor the end. Thus the mind is humbled at the same time that it is expanded; held in awe at the same time that it is delighted; and from the glory of the structure it is led to infer the still greater glory of Him by whom that structure must have been reared, who sustains it by his power, directs it by his wisdom, and makes it conducive to so many purposes of utility and happiness.

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The study of this majestic, this universal subject, with the appearances and laws of the different parts of which it is made up, forms the Science of Astronomy-the earliest, the most delightful, and, through the continued .abours of the wise and the great of all ages, now the most perfect with which we are acquainted.

Although the particular country remains undetermined, it is now generally allowed that the Orientals were the first who devoted themselves to the study of Astronomy, and there are strong grounds for believing that at a period, of which few traces remain, their notions were much nearer the truth than those which obtained at times comparatively less remote. The Chaldeans and the Egyptians divide between them the honour of being the first astronomers; and certainly, the extended level surface, and the transparent and cloudless sky of those countries, admirably adapted them for these purposes. Among them, however, the knowledge of the celestial bodies was made the means of enslaving the minds of the people, and rendering them subservient to the purposes of those who themselves knew better. It was not in the simpler parts of the science only that those early astronomers made great progress. More than 700 years before the Christian era they observed eclipses, and determined the period during which the moon returns to be precisely in the same point of the heavens. This they fixed at 6585 days, 8 hours, being only about 17 minutes different from the same period, as ascertained by the nicest observation of the moderns. The Egyptians determined the length of the year to be 365 and 1-4th days, and were acquainted with many of the motions and phenomena of the planets, which they explained upon principles that were in a great measure correct. The Phoenicians, who are the first people upon record that made long voyages, probably borrowing the hint from their Egyptian and Chaldean neighbours, applied astronomy to the purposes of navigation, and were the first who took the heavens as a guide in finding their way upon the trackless ocean. Each of the Oriental nations, excepting, perhaps, the very rude ones of the frozen north, had some astronomical knowledge, and made use of the appearances of the celestial bodies as a means of fixing the dates of occurrences in their history, with a degree of precision which could not have been acquired in any other manner. The Greeks came later, but they made more rapid advances in the details of astronomy than appear to have been made by the earlier nations: but at the same time their love of fiction and romance led them to complete by invention that which could only be completed by the more slow and laborious progress of observation. Many of the Greek discoveries were brilliant, and some of their conjectures have been verified after the lapse of 2000 years of scepticism; but they never could get rid of the idea that the universe consisted of a certain number of spheres, or globular shells, contained one within the other, and endowed with very varied and complicated motions. The Romans, by whom the Grecks were preceded as a leading people, con

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