With Notes, Chronological Tables, Lists of Councils, Examination Questions, and other (From A.D. 1 to A.D. 313.) BY THE REV. ISLAY BURNS, M.A. "Let me thank you cordially for your kind present of a copy of your able and eloquent History of the SENIOR READER. THOU ART, O GOD. THOU art, O God, the life and light Are but reflections caught from Thee: Through golden vistas into Heaven- When Night, with wings of starry gloom, When youthful Spring around us breathes, MOORE. THE EARTH'S JOURNEY ROUND THE SUN. ONE, two, three, four, five! Does the reader know that while he has been counting these five beats, five seconds, he has actually been conveyed through space a distance of more than a hundred miles? Yet so it is. However incredible it may seem, no fact is more certain than that the earth is constantly on the wing, flying around the sun with a velocity so prodigious, that for every breath we draw we advance on our way forty or fifty miles. If, when passing across the waters in a steam-boat, we can wake, after a night's repose, and find ourselves conducted on our voyage a hundred miles, we exult in the triumphs of art, which has moved so ponderous a body as a steam-ship over such a space in so short a time, and so quietly, too, as not to disturb our slumbers; but, with a motion vastly more quiet and uniform, we have, in the same interval, been carried along with the earth in its orbit more than half a million of miles. In the case of the steam-ship, however perfect the machinery may be, we still, in our waking hours at least, are made sensible of the action of the forces by which the motion is maintained, as the roaring of the fire, the beating of the piston, and the dashing of the paddle-wheels; but in the more perfect machinery which carries the earth forward on its grander voyage, no sound is heard, nor the least intimation afforded of the stupendous forces by which this motion is achieved. The distance of the sun from the earth is about ninety-five millions of miles. No human mind can comprehend fully what this vast distance means. But we may form some conception of it by such an illustration as this: A ship may leave Liverpool and cross the Atlantic to New York after twenty days' steady sail; but it would take that ship, moving constantly at the rate of ten miles an hour, more than a thousand years to reach the sun. And yet, at this vast distance, the sun, by his power of attrac tion, serves as the great regulator of the planetary motions, bending them continually from the straight line in which they tend to move, and compelling them to circulate around him, each at nearly |