WONDERS OF ASTRONOMY. ASTRONOMY is the best adapted of all the sciences to impress the mind with the grandeur and immensity of creation, and the stupendous power of the Creator. Let us recount some of those truths which seem to be especially suited to produce such impressions. Conceive yourself raised above the earth, and placed a little in advance of it, and what a sight would present itself to your view! An immense globe, nearly twenty-five thousand miles in circumference-rushing towards you with a velocity of more than eleven hundred miles in a minute; and, at the same time, turning its burden of continents, islands, and seas, into and from your view. What an irresistible arm must it be that sweeps that mighty mass onwards in its rapid career, and yet Astronomy has far more stupendous instances of omnipotent power to exhibit to us. It is conjectured that millions of opaque bodies revolve around the sun, which are only occasionally visible to us, as shooting-stars, fire-balls, and ærolites. Some, perhaps revolve around the earth-indeed, one is believed to do so in three hours and twenty minutes, at a height of five thousand miles above us. The Zodiacal light, which is only visible in our atmosphere in spring and autumn, is attributed to an extremely oblate ring of nebulous matter, revolving between the orbits of Venus and Mars. Here is a ring, many millions of miles in diameter, rotating freely in space-a stupendous wheel, truly! The rings of Saturn offer another special instance of exquisite skill and all-sufficient power. These rings, the outermost of which is more than one hundred and seventy thousand miles across, surround and rotate about a globe, whose circumference is about two hundred and fifty thousand miles, without either clashing with one another or with the huge orb which they encircle. Let it be remembered that this orb is at the same time revolving round its axis, and hastening onwards in its orbit. What a complication of simultaneous movements is here, and yet there is no jostling-all proceeds calmly and safely, a beautiful piece of His workmanship who" hath stretched out the heavens by his discretion." Again, multiple stars-that is, stars which revolve around a common centre of gravity-offer a singular subject for our consideration. Some of these are of different colours, as red, blue, green, so that a planet revolving around one of such parti-coloured suns will have days of different hues, as "a red and a green day, for instance, alternating with a white one and with darkness;" and this is not all, for the seasons also are affected by these suns, so that such a planet will have them curiously complicated. At times there will be grand summers of intense heat, such as our own globe perhaps once experienced, when a tropical vegetation covered the icy regions around the poles. But still greater wonders await our notice, for Astronomy has taught us to regard our sun and our starry heavens as but one out of unnumbered islands of stars floating-for they too are thought to move in the regions of space and it has even surveyed the island which we inhabit, and mapped down our position in it. Now our nearest neighbour-for as neighbours we must regard the stars in our own island-is so far distant that its light, travelling one hundred and ninety-two thousand miles in a second, requires at the very least nearly three years and a quarter to reach us; whilst those stars which we can only just see with the naked eye, * sent forth the rays which render them visible nearly one hundred and forty years ago. Let us now take the telescope, and still greater wonders will unfold themselves; patches of faint light of many shapes, globular, elliptical, spiral, resolve into millions of stars, sparkling in the far-off regions of space, forming star islands, some of whose orbs are computed to take about sixty thousand years in transmitting the ray which informs us of their existence. Truly this is astounding! But Astronomy takes us further than this. The most powerful telescope still leaves luminous mists which it cannot resolve, and some of these are thought to be so distant, that more than TWENTY MILLIONS of years have elapsed since the rays of light quitted them which now make us cognizant, not of their present existence, but of their being in existence so many ages ago. Further than this we cannot go―here the flagging and wearied wing of reason must cease to beat; but imagination can still continue its flight, and take us to worlds created millions of ages ago, whose light is at this moment flying onwards to our globe, to reach it for the first time at some far distant period. Here let us pause, and in humble adoration exclaim, "When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained; what is man that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that Thou visitest him?" EXTRACTS FROM THE JOURNAL OF AN OLD TRAVELLER. BIRDS OF PREY-THEIR INCREDIBLE NUMBER AND VORACITY. "IN the Tchorlù desert, and indeed all along this savage high-road of the Ottoman Empire in Europe, we come rather frequently upon great companies of vultures and other birds of prey (ravenously occupied in the consumption of carrion), or upon the clean skeletons and polished bones of oxen and horses. Saving the bones, the animals that die get almost as quick a sepulture as the Turks. An over-wrought ox falls down and meekly dies; a worn-out horse rolls on his side, stretches out his legs, and goes the same way as the ox, perishing by the road-side. Let it be beef or horse-flesh, breath is no sooner out of the body than clouds of these vultures, all invisible before, and coming as it were out of empty space, from east, west, north and south, flit across the sky and meet at the banquet; and then, in an incredibly short space of time, the body is devoured and every bone polished. These hideous-looking gluttons were quite as numerous over in Asia Minor; but I think not more so than in Roumelia. On that beautiful autumnal evening, when we were entering the defile of the Koradère (between the forlorn town of Kutayah and the ancient and utterly ruined city of Nicæa), the bright sky was suddenly darkened over our heads by a flight of the obscene fowl. They had scented death afar off; in some place to us invisible, some animate creature had ceased to live, and they were going to batten on it; and, in their dark-grey coats, to play altogether the several parts of undertaker, sexton, and gravedigger. There was no conceiving whence they sprang so suddenly: one moment the blue heaven had speck on it, and there was not a sound in the air; the next moment the cloud was over us, and the ominous scream in our ears." not a THE PUBLIC DEBT OF THE NATION. THE following statement of the Public Debt may prove interesting to some of our readers: caused no doubt both by prodigality as well as by necessity, we are not the less bound to its repayment. Time has been when some writers and politicians have considered the debt as an advantage, rather than as a grievance. It is useless now to discuss such exploded theories. Everybody now is aware that the remission of such a sum as twenty-eight millions would cause every tax on articles of consumption to be removed, and thus render the necessaries as well as the comforts of life more easily attainable. Such a state of thing is impossible; but it will be well for legislators to know that in the proportion they make existence in this world easy, they diminish the causes of crime, and Christianize the soul as they add to the needful comforts of the body. A Parliamentary return in relation to the public debt gives the following particulars of its variations during the last thirty years, both as regards the amount of principal and the annual cost for the payment of interest. It will be seen that the reduction in the principal effected during that period has been only 50,000,000l., or 6 per cent., but that as regards the annual charge for interest it has been 3,326,424/., or nearly 11 per cent. The lowest point at which the national debt ever stood of late years was in 1834, when it had declined to 772,196,8497., or to ten millions below the sum at which it now stands; the Emancipation loan in 1835 and the Irish famine loan in 1847 having far more than counterbalanced all subsequent reductions. It is to be remarked, however, that, owing to the conversion of the Three-and-a-Half per Cents., and the low rates paid upon the unfunded debt, &c., the actual cost of these obligations is now smaller than at that period. During the next seven or eight years this charge will experience a further diminution of 3,207,500l., of which 600,000l. will take place by the Three-and-a-Quarter per Cents. becoming Three per Cents. in October 1854, while the cessation of the remainder will occur through the expiry of the Long Annuities in January 1860, for 1,293,500l., and of other annuities, amounting to 1,314,000l., during the intervening time. The annuity held by the Bank for 585,700l. does not terminate till 1867. The unfunded debt, which is included in the subjoined totals, was less in 1851 than in any other year of the series, its amount being 17,742,8007. In 1822 it was as high as 36,281,1507.:— THE HOME FRIEND; A WEEKLY MISCELLANY OF AMUSEMENT AND INSTRUCTION. PUBLISHED EVERY WEDNESDAY, BY THE SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE, No. 39.] [PRICE 1d. THE inhospitable rock of Skerryvore is so completely exposed to the full fury of the Atlantic Ocean, that it is consequently surrounded by an almost perpetual line of surf, which renders a landing on it always dangerous, and sometimes impossible. The cluster of rocks, of which it is the largest, have always been a just cause of terror to the mariner; and although a beacon to warn him of his approach to their dangerous vicinity was almost a necessity, yet the confined and rugged surface presented such extreme difficulties to its erection, that for many years none was even attempted. "So discouraging," says Mr. Alan Stevenson, "was the consideration of the expense, and the uncertainty of the final success of such a work, that the Commissioners of the Northern Lighthouses, after successfully completing the arduous and somewhat similar work on the Bell Rock, were induced to proceed with other operations of less magnitude, but probably, in some respects, of no less utility, and to delay the construction of the Skerryvore Lighthouse until 1838, although the Act of Parliament authorizing its erection was obtained so long ago as 1814. The first landing that my father, in the course of his annual voyage round the coast as engineer of the Northern Lighthouse Board, effected on Skerryvore was in 1804. In 1814 he visited it a second time, while accompanying a committee of the Commissioners on a tour of inspection to the lighthouses all round the coast, from the Frith of Forth to the Clyde." On this excursion they were accompanied by no less a person than Sir Walter Scott; and his entry of the visit to Skerryvore, made in his diary, will perhaps give as good an idea of its situation as we can offer : "Having crept upon deck," says Sir Walter, "about four in the morning, I find we are beating to windward off the Isle of Tyree, with the determination of Mr. Stevenson, that his constituents should visit a reef of rocks called Skerryvore, where he thought it would be essential to have a lighthouse. Loud remonstrances on the part of the Commissioners, who one and all declare they will subscribe to his opinion whatever it may be, rather than continue the terrible buffeting. Quiet perseverance on the part of Mr. S., and great kicking, bouncing, and squabbling upon that of the yacht, who seems to like the idea of Skerryvore as little as the Commissioners. At length, by dint of exertion, come in sight of this long ridge of rocks (chiefly under water), on which the tide breaks in a most tremendous style. There appear a few low broad rocks at one end of the reef, which is about a mile in length. These are never entirely under water, though the surf dashes over them. To go through all the forms, Hamilton, Duff, and I resolve to land upon these rocks, in company with Mr. Stevenson. Pull through a very heavy swell with great difficulty, and approach a tremendous surf, dashing over black pointed rocks. Our rowers, however, get the boat into a quiet creek between two rocks, where we contrive to land, well wetted. I saw nothing remarkable in my way excepting several seals, which we might have shot; but in the doubtful circumstances of the landing, we did not care to bring guns. We took possession of the rock in the name of the Commissioners, and generously bestowed our own great names on its crags and creeks. The rock was carefully measured by Mr. S. It will be a most desolate position for a lighthouse-the Bell Rock and Eddystone a joke to it, for the nearest land is the wild island of Tyree, at fourteen miles distance." It may also be added, that it is twenty miles from Iona, and fifty-three from Mallinhead in the county of Donegal, Ireland. The principal rock is about fifty miles from the nearest point of mainland of Scotland. Thus lying in an irregular semicircular sea, enclosed by the southern extremity of the Hebrides, the rugged shores of Argyllshire, and the northern coast of Ireland, but open on the other to the Atlantic. On this important spot was a lighthouse constructed by the almost incredible exertions of Mr. |