Note 22 — Astronomy.

The letters of Sir Isaac Newton to Dr. Bentley, containing suggestions for the Boyle Lectures, possess a peculiar interest in the present day. “They show” (says Sir David Brewster) “that the nebular hypothesis, the dull and dangerous heresy of the age, is incompatible with the established laws of the material universe, and that an omnipotent arm was required to give the planets their positions and motions in space, and a presiding intelligence to assign to them the different functions they had to perform.”—Life of Newton, vol. ii.