396 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



system of laws has spontaneously been developed out of another, we 

 cannot avoid making a comparison between the feeble contrivances of 

 men and the means resorted to for the conservation of the world. We 

 are accustomed to look back with admiration to the wisdom of those 

 great men who laid the foundations of this republic, and established a 

 constitution for it ; but what would our admiration be if it had been 

 possible for them to have enacted one single law of such simplicity 

 and comprehensiveness, that every other law, by any possibility 

 required in all the contingencies of a thousand years, should have 

 spontaneously sprung out of it ? if it had been possible for them, by 

 one legislative act, to have completed and brought to a conclusion all 

 legislation ? The good and evil which we constantly see arising in 

 our political assemblies, what are they but commentaries on the want 

 of wisdom and want of power of man ? But what is not possible to 

 man is possible to God ; and I think it will always elicit from a reflect- 

 ing mind a tribute of veneration, to know that this great and intricate 

 machine of the tmiverse, with all the millions of beings, living and 

 inanimate, that compose it, with all their aflections, attributes, and 

 relations, are sustained and governed according to the original and 

 unvarying intention of their changeless Author; that from the be- 

 ginning of things, as respects its physical condition, there never has 

 arisen occasion for retouching a work perfect in itself from the first. 

 I am not among those who regard this system of acting through 

 ancient and self-imposed law as in any wise derogatory to the Great 

 First Cause. I appeal to the common decision of mankind, whose 

 admiration of any human contrivance or machine is greater in propor- 

 tion as the machine is self-acting, performing its effects with rigorous 

 precision, according to the conditions under which it was constructed ; 

 but less, if the engineer has from time to time to interfere in order to 

 insure its successful action. I recall that well-known maxim of the 

 law, " Qui facit per alium facit per se " — whoso acts through another, 

 acts himself. It makes no difference in my estimation, in this respect, 

 whether the Architect of the universe himself directly interposed, and 

 compelled such a constitution of the earth's atmosphere as was con- 

 ducive to the ends he had in view, or whether, under the laws he had 

 imposed on it, the obedient sun proceeded to discharge that task, and 

 put forth his rays with unwonted effulgence, bringing on a great 

 increase in the amount of vegetable life, a great depuration of the at- 

 mosphere, the burial of enormous quantities of carbon in the ground, 

 and the gradual assumption by the air of that condition suited to 

 the support of a high organization, and of the life of man. I appeal 

 to the experience of us all — each of the celestial phenomena we witness, 

 the revolutions of the stars, the return of comets, the occurrence of 

 eclipses, each of the changes that happen on earth, the flux of the 

 tides, day and night, summer and winter, the budding of trees and un- 

 folding of flowers, the rise and fall of empires — do they not all take 



