astronomer considered "mad," because, perhaps, there was no absolute manifestation of design in the orbs themselves, or only so in their motive power. True, indeed, there is nothing in their abstract condition to raise our conviction of Creative Power beyond the evidence supplied by the smallest fragment of matter. But a multitude of worlds are seen when we mount to the stellar heavens upon the analogies supplied by our own planet. In this relative sense, a series of vast designs crowd upon enlightened reason, and he who is true to his reason must come to the conclusion that it is with every star as with the Earth,

"Such as Creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now."

Such, indeed, is the conclusion to which the astronomer is fast finding his way by his own mechanical inventions, and by his supposed discovery that comets are among the lightest of gaseous bodies. But I waive the fanciful analogy supplied by the latter, and only mention it to show how one hypothesis becomes a groundwork for another. It is enough that we point to the nebulæ alone,— to the climax of the Plutonic doctrines of Creation. Those nebulæ, so long a liquid fire to grow into systems like our own, (one of which, according to Arago, would have occupied all space,) are now

seen as a "powdering of stars," receding in the distance, pile upon pile, as if a cone stretching out beyond the bounds of imagination.

The

Reason, the analogies of Nature, Unity of Design in the great plan of Creation, have had no part in the Astronomer's conversion from a chaotic state of the heavens to a symmetry of worlds. The telescope alone has dispelled his illusion; but it has gained a fact which goes with all former knowledge in proving, that every fabric of the human mind which is entitled to the appellation of a science is founded in consummate Design. astronomer, it is true, still clings to the vestige of his dream, and lingers upon the fathomless abyss of light where myriads of stars mingle their effulgence to his physical eye; but he lingers with a hope, which the very next step he may take in mechanical optics will prove to have been as faithless as his former visions, and will carry him upwards and onwards through other telescopic worlds, but forever bounded by the halo which had been the ignis fatuus of his philosophy.

However beautiful, therefore, the nebular hypothesis of Creation, and however reluctant its surrender to the glory of the Almighty, it must fall, and with greater precipitation than it rose; for it

is the astronomer himself who is demolishing the fabric. And with it must pass into oblivion the whole Plutonic scheme of the Earth's formation, so long an analogical basis of the nebular theory of the heavens; or only remembered among those eighty other systems in Geology which were grouped under one general condemnation by the French Academy.

The astronomer, however, enjoys a pretext for his factitious philosophy far beyond the propagandists of materialism and spontaneous generation. The former may see in matter and its laws a Creative Power, and imagine, in opposition to all that is known of secondary causes, that He, who "spake and it was done," who tells us that, "Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them," did, nevertheless, consign His chaotic work, with all its ultimate designs as a symmetrical whole, and in its vast and critical relations to life, to the operation of the laws impressed upon it. He may "see gods in clouds and hear them in the wind." His inquiry may stop there; and overlooking all final causes, he may confound the agencies of matter with Creative Energy. But not so with the physiologist; for the organic being, whether in reason, instinct, organization, func

tions, properties, laws, is the embodiment of Infinite Wisdom.*

* See Author's Institutes of Medicine, § 353–361. The properties and forces which are impressed upon matter, and the laws which they obey, have never been known to bring any design into being. On the contrary, they are ultimately and universally destructive of all elementary combinations, and, therefore, of the designs into which they may have been associated. But the Creator, having formed the designs, substituted for his Creative Energy the special laws by which they have been carried on. The rudiments of organic beings have been perpetuated in connection with the properties of life, and the laws impressed upon them, since they came from the hands of the Creator, and are the present source of all animated beings. If we deny this, we must equally deny the Creation of matter. (See Institutes, &c., as to the supposed eyeless fish of the Kentucky cave, § 74.) The laws, however, can operate only while the constituent parts of the designs exist. This is strikingly manifest in the living being. Here lies the great error of the closet speculatist. Hence the sophisty of the argument which assumes the existing laws that preside over the works of Design as having evolved those designs out of chaotic matter. They can have no other operation, without the mechanical design itself, than what is seen of their destructive effects in the mineral kingdom; and what should confound the sophist is the fact that the moment the principle of life, the peculiar force which truly carries on the functions of organic mechanism, becomes extinct, those other forces, to which he ascribes the evolution from the merest matter of all the wonderful designs on earth and in the heavens, speedily lay waste the entire organic fabric, and crumble it into its simple elements. The whole tendency of the physical and chemical forces impressed upon matter is to destroy, not to create or improve. (See Institutes of Medicine, § 360.) Even gravitation would bring worlds into contact without the centrifugal force; and this force as appertaining to

comets is proof of its origin in Design throughout the systems which obey its laws. All physical agents, also, as light, heat &c., contribute alike destructive influences upon inanimate compounds of an organic or inorganic nature. But the living compound resists their action as completely as it does those of the chemical properties which are impressed upon the elements of which the living being is composed. But, although the destructive forces which are impressed upon matter are held in subjection by the principle of life, and which effects combinations in direct opposition to them, the extraneous physical agents, like light, heat, oxygen gas, &c., develop the energies of life in the seed and egg, and are its indispensable stimuli at every instant after the development of the living fabric begins. But, as soon as the resisting cause is withdrawn, they turn with destructive effect upon the fabric which they had been instrumental in rearing up, and pour their united force upon those chemical tendencies which were impressed upon the simple elements, and through whose combined agency" the dust returns to the earth as it was."

Now let us see how far the statements of Scripture agree with what is manifestly fundamental in Nature. We are told, for example, that man and beast were created entire out of the earth; but had it been said that the materials of the earth organized themselves into living beings, the Narrative would be rejected as an imposture. Nay, more: had it been affirmed that man was created in the eondition of an infant, and thus left to grow up to maturity under the influence of the laws which actually govern his organization, the statement would be unanimously pronounced absurd, even by such advocates of spontaneous generation as are quoted at pages 10-20. The infant, without a ray of instinct, (pages 93, 105,) destitute of volition and muscular power, the personification of Helplessness, and for years dependent on maturer age, growing up to manhood under physical circumstances alone! Yet is this doctrine extensively propagated through the delusion that the Creator endowed certain forms of inorganic matter with the properties requisite to enable them to combine,