THE FIRST HEAVEN, OR World of Air. CHAPTER I. THE AIR. "Lo, the poor Indian, with untutored mind, Sees God in clouds, and hears Him in the wind." POPE. HE expression "heaven," as applied to our atmosphere, is essentially Jewish as well as Eastern. Many of the Jewish Rabbis held that there were seven heavens. St. Paul refers to three heavens (2 Cor. xii. 2), doubtless in the same sense in which his countrymen were in the habit at that time of applying it. Six hundred years after Paul, Mahomet, in constructing the fable of his celebrated night journey from Mecca to Jerusalem, revived the old Jewish idea of the seven heavens, through which he professed to have passed. This old Jewish notion, it need scarcely be said, was a tissue of absurdities, quite as bad as Mahomet's, which was thus founded upon it. Not so, however, the doctrine held upon this subject in the Apostle's day. The THE FIRST OR World of Air. CHAPTER 1. THE AIR. "Lo, the poor Indian, with untutored mind, Sees God in clouds, and hears Him in the wind." POPE. HE expression "heaven," as applied to our atmosphere, is essentially Jewish as well as Eastern. Many of the Jewish Rabbis held that there were seven heavens. St. Paul refers to three heavens (2 Cor. xii. 2), doubtless in the same sense in which his countrymen were in the habit at that time of applying it. Six hundred years after Paul, Mahomet, in constructing the fable of his celebrated night journey from Mecca to Jerusalem, revived the old Jewish idea of the seven heavens, through which he professed to have passed. This old Jewish notion, it need scarcely be said, was a tissue of absurdities, quite as bad as Mahomet's, which was thus founded upon it. Not so, however, the doctrine held upon this subject in the Apostle's day. The heavens were divided then into three: first, the ærial, or atmospheric, in which birds fly, clouds and showers. are formed, and winds blow; secondly, the starry heavens, or the regions of space, in which the sun, moon, and stars are disposed; and, lastly, the heaven of heavens, or third heaven, referred to in the passage already mentioned by St. Paul as the abode of the blessed and of the holy angels, and the special residence of the Most High. This division is not only natural and unobjectionable, but according to fact; and while it rescues the word heaven from the confusion of ideas often entertained by the use of that word, each department will afford an interesting topic for the consideration of those who love such subjects, respectively; while, as the doctrines of the Christian faith lead us to believe that we ourselves shall one day pass through the first two as the great ante-chambers to the third,-in considering any one of them we shall be but, as it were, anticipating a part of our journey heavenward and homeward; for thither our home must surely be, where Christ our Lord Himself ascended, till a cloud concealed Him from view. Each of these departments, however, embraces a separate and distinct subject, bringing us, as we pass through them respectively, into the territories or provinces of the Meteorologist or Natural Philosopher, the Astronomer, and the Theologian; each therefore may and should be considered separately by itself: the object of the present paper being merely the first-mentioned. Through a great portion of this, man has actually passed in the body, and though unprovided with wings, has soared to heights beyond that to which any bird has attained,—and from the car of the balloon, seven miles perpendicularly from the surface of the earth, has explored these strange and silent regions, and, losing sight of the world he inhabits, has witnessed the mountains of a cloud-world rolling far beneath him, and piled in snowy heaps and fantastic pinnacles, to which the solid Alpine masses below are but molehills. But, curious and highly interesting as such ærial excursions must be to those who have nerve and head to engage in them, they have not added much to the knowledge of this region, already attained by accurate chemical analysis and observation before any such ærial chariot as a balloon was known. The result of such analysis and examination we now proceed to give in a popular shape. Most of our readers are doubtless aware that surrounding our globe, and attached to it, is an ærial envelope, or ocean of air, that revolves with our planet as though it were a part of it, and which is called the atmosphere, from two Greek words signifying a sphere or globe of air. Though lighter a good deal than water, air is yet of considerable weight, pressing down upon the earth, and upon us on every side, just as the ocean does on its bed and upon the fish that inhabit its depths. It is, in fact, as much an ocean to us as the sea is to its inhabitants, and like the sea it is subject to violent agitations, having its own storms as well as calms; its own waves, and currents, and whirlpools; its own tides too, with their regular ebbs and flows. Like the sea, too, it has its own peculiar colour that belongs to nothing else, hence called sky-blue, as the green of the sea is |