Sir David Brewster, in his eloquent advocacy of the doctrine of “more
worlds than one,” thus argues for their peopling:
Man, in his future state of existence, is to consist, as at
present, of a spiritual nature residing in a corporeal frame. He
must live, therefore, upon a material planet, subject to all the
laws of matter, and performing functions for which a material body
is indispensable. We must consequently find for the race of Adam,
if not races that may have preceded him, a material home upon which
they may reside, or by which they may travel, by means unknown to
us, to other localities in the universe. At the present hour, the
inhabitants of the earth are nearly _a thousand millions_; and
by whatever process we may compute the numbers that have existed
before the present generation, and estimate those that are yet to
inherit the earth, we shall obtain a population which the habitable
parts of our globe could not possibly accommodate. If there is not
room, then, on our earth for the millions of millions of beings who
have lived and died upon its surface, and who may yet live and die
during the period fixed for its occupation by man, we can scarcely
doubt that their future abode must be on some of the primary or
secondary planets of the solar system, whose inhabitants have
ceased to exist like those on the earth, or upon planets in our own
or in other systems which have been in a state of preparation, as
our earth was, for the advent of intellectual life.
“GAUGING THE HEAVENS.”
Sir William Herschel, in 1785, conceived the happy idea of counting
the number of stars which passed at different heights and in various
directions over the field of view, of fifteen minutes in diameter,
of his twenty-feet reflecting telescope. The field of view each time
embraced only 1/833000th of the whole heavens; and it would therefore
require, according to Struve, eighty-three years to gauge the whole
sphere by a similar process.