deeply interesting question of a plurality of worlds, taught, as he conceives, by both the heavens and the heavens' Lord, in His Word. Notwithstanding our ignorance astronomically of how many or which of the planets are now inhabited, the statement of our Lord in the fourteenth of John declares positively the existence of many mansions or dwelling-places there, while other parts of Scripture dwell upon the existence of numerous intelligent beings besides ourselves, who have left their dwelling on high to visit us. The truths thus suggested by astronomy are confirmed by Scripture, and lend an interest to researches in the heavens and the observation of the planetary worlds there, which they would not otherwise possess. From the consideration of a plurality of worlds it is but another step to that of the existence of the third heaven. Here astronomy and Scripture seem to have combined, and agree, each lending their own peculiar evidence to this grand conclusion. How far the writer has succeeded in elucidating this, one of the cardinal truths and doctrines of Christianity astronomically, he leaves for his readers to judge. The evidence of astronomy to that great truth, however, he would remind his readers is more suggestive than demonstrative, and, however interesting to the thoughtful mind, can at the most be only a matter for reasonable speculation. The great fact and doctrine

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of air; we are at once made conscious of something resembling water in its feeling, but much lighter and less sensible. But, without moving at all ourselves, a fresh breeze or a storm at once assures us of its substantial presence, without the possibility of doubt, and from the gentle trembling of the aspen leaf to the uptorn roots of the monarch of the forest, we perceive that we are enveloped in a substance that from a slumbering infant can become a terrible giant in strength and power.

Insensible as we are thus generally to its influence when undisturbed, yet its substantiality can be further proved by its weight, which presses upon us with a weight of not less than fifteen pounds to the square inch. This fact of its pressure was known before air was actually weighed and its weight ascertained. Aristotle even asserted that air had weight, and speaks of a bladder filled with air weighing more than an empty one; but this doctrine was abandoned by his followers in the middle ages, and it was left to comparatively modern days to revive the great truth propounded by that sagacious philosopher. The proof that air has weight was demonstrated about the close of the last century by the simple experiment of weighing a bottle containing air, in a scale, and weighing the same bottle again after the air had been exhausted from it by an air-pump. Having thus ascertained its weight, the inference followed as the inevitabie conclusion,-that, like other bodies having weight, it exercises a proportional pressure upon everything it comes in contact with ;-fortunately for us, however, this pressure is not exercised in one direction alone, but from all sides equally-from the interior of

our bodies (where it acts upon the fluids) as well as upon the exterior from without; so that, being supported as it were on every side, we feel no inconvenience from it, but are perfectly insensible to its pressure. Were a fourth part of the pressure it thus exercises upon us to be extended in one direction, as from above, we should be forthwith crushed to death upon the earth; as it is, however, we move freely through it, the little child as well as the strong man alike insensible to the burden they bear. The weight or pressure of the air, however, is not always the same, and at the surface of the earth, where it is most dense, undergoes considerable changes; this we know by the barometer, that curious and beautiful instrument in which a column of mercury or quicksilver balances its weight to a fraction, and reveals to us every variation of the pressure of this invisible agent, however slight, through every moment of time. This pressure and weight becomes less in regular proportion as we ascend to a height, the air expanding and becoming thinner as it expands, till at length it becomes so thin and light as to render it unfit for breathing, and finally, it is believed on good grounds, ceases altogether at fortyfive or fifty miles from the earth; all this we have ascertained from the barometer alone, which indicates the slightest change, and thus becomes the measure of any height we may attain from the earth.

When ascending to the summits of lofty mountains, such as the Alps or Himalayas, or still higher in balloons, as was lately achieved by Mr. Glaisher and Mr. Coxwell, this gradual thinning and expansion of the atmosphere becomes painfully evident to the senses, and is accompanied by great inconvenience and not a little danger to

of His fingers who made them all. It is this that lends a charm to such an investigation.* In the world of nature is a rich mine, but pure scientific investigation alone cannot draw forth its gold: however necessary and useful purely scientific treatises are for supplying information to the mathematician or the physicist, to the general reader, especially one who believes in the book of Revelation (and for such the following work is principally intended), such treatises are unsuitable. He feels the world of nature, however wonderful, to be a lonely world to walk through unaccompanied by its Maker, without any reference to Him, without perceiving His hand or hearing His voice. He hears the latter in the song of the thrush, or the robin that sits on the spray, as well as in the peal of thunder that rolls its echoes through the world. He sees the former as plainly in the sparrow's fall as in the planet's orbit, in the shadowy cloud that passes as in the mighty Sun that dissolves it. Nature, in every de

"If one train of thinking," says Paley, "be more desirable than another, it is that which regards the phenomena of nature with a constant reference to a Supreme and Intelligent Author. To have made this the ruling, the habitual sentiment of our minds, is to have laid the foundation of everything that is religious. The world itself thenceforth becomes a temple, and life itself one continued act of adoration. The change is no less than this: that whereas formerly God was seldom in our thoughts, we can now scarcely look upon anything without perceiving its relation to Him." -Paley's Natural Theology.

partment without God, is to him as our planet without its sun. He treads a cold and cheerless region, however beautiful to the eye, and the universe becomes but a piece of self-acting mechanism,-a body without a soul. That such is the case, however, nature herself strenuously denies, while Revelation amply testifies to the contrary. And it is the unhappy divorce of these two books,-nature and Revelation,-by the many followers of science in the present day, and the consequent separation of science and religion, that has, in the opinion of the writer, conduced much to the disastrous scepticism, and materialistic atheism that prevails and is characteristic of the present age. What God has joined no man should put asunder; and it is the belief of the writer that while this unnatural separation has led from partial scepticism even to the denial of all religion, and the personality of the Creator, on the part of some of our most distinguished men of science, the united and joint evidence of both witnesses would, if admitted, bring overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It is, as in the case of two witnesses in a court of justice: different kinds of evidence are supplied by each, but both are equally needful, and one supplements the other. Thus we shall find that many of the problems and mysteries which cannot be solved by nature are resolved by Revelation, and vice versa. Nor