No, 5.] HUNT — RELATIONS OF THE SCIENCES. 261 



The adjective, quick, is here to be understood in its primi- 

 tive sense of living, as opposed to dead, and aptly defines the 

 notion which I have endeavored to convey. XW the energies 

 seen in nature, are in this view, but manifestations of the essen- 

 tial life or quickness of matter, whether displayed in the domain 

 of what are called dynamical or physical activities, in chemical 

 processes, or in the phenomena of irritability, assimilation, 

 growth and reproduction which we may comprehensively desig- 

 nate as biotical. 



When we have attained to this conception of hylozoism. of a 



living material universe, the mystery of nature is solved. The 



Cosmos is not; as some would have it, a vast machine wound up 



and set in motion with the certainty that it will run down 



like a clock, and arrive at a period of stagnation and death. 



The modern theory of thermodynamic, though perhaps true 



within its limitations, has not yet grasped the problem of the 



universe. The force that originated and impelled, sustains, and 



is the Divine Spirit, which 



" Lives through all life, extends through all extent, 

 Spreads undivided, operates unspent." 



The law of birth, growth and decay, of endless change and 

 perpetual renewal, is everywhere seen working throughout the 

 Cosmos, in nebula, in world and in sun, as in rock, in herb and 

 in man, all of which are but passing phases in the endless circu- 

 lation of the universe, in that perpetual new birth which we call 

 Nature. This, it will be said, is the poet's view of the external 

 world, but it is at the same time the one which seems to me to be 

 forced upon us as the highest generalization of modern science. 



The study of Nature in its details presents itself to the mind 

 in a two-fold aspect, — as historical and as philosophical. The 

 first of these gives rise to a General Physiography or descrip- 

 tion of nature, which we commonly call Natural History as 

 applied to each of the three great divisions designated as the 

 mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms. This physiographic 

 method of study in the latter two gives us systematic and de- 

 scriptive botany and zoology, with their classification and their 

 terminology ; while the physiography of the mineral kingdom 

 includes not only systematic and descriptive mineralogy, as gen- 

 erally understood, but those branches of geology which we desig- 

 nate as petrography and geognosy, or the study of the constituents 

 of the earth's crust, their aggregation and their distribution. 



