164 ESSAYS. 
naturalists of the present day, that hardly a discourse can be 
pronounced or an investigation prosecuted without reference 
to them. I suppose that the views here taken are little, if at 
all, in advance of the average scientific mind of the day. I 
cannot regard them as less noble than those which they are 
succeeding. ' 
An able philosophical writer, Miss Frances Power Cobbe, 
has recently and truthfully said : ! 
“Tt is a singular fact, that when we can find out how any- 
thing is done, our first conclusion seems to be that God did 
not do it. No matter how wonderful, how beautiful, how in- 
timately complex and delicate has been the machinery which 
has worked, perhaps for centuries, perhaps for millions of 
ages, to bring about some beneficent result, if we can but 
catch a glimpse of the wheels its divine character disappears.” 
I agree with the writer that this first conclusion is prema- 
ture and unworthy, — I will add, deplorable. Through what 
faults or infirmities of dogmatism on the one hand, and skep- 
ticism on the other, it came to be so thought, we need not 
here consider. Let us hope, and I confidently expect, that it 
is not to last ; that the religious faith which survived without 
a shock the notion of the fixity of the earth itself may equally 
outlast the notion of the absolute fixity of the species which 
inhabit it; that in the future even more than in the past, 
faith in an order, which is the basis of science, will not —as 
it cannot reasonably — be dissevered from faith in an Or- 
dainer, which is the basis of religion. 
APPENDIX. 
Ve 
Iw the following table the names in the left-hand column are from 
my “ Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States,” and 
from Dr. Chapman’s “Flora of the Southern United States,” the 
two together comprehending the flora of the Atlantic United States 
east of the Mississippi River. Alpine plants on the one hand, and 
subtropical plants on the other, are excluded. 
” 
in ‘* Theological Review,” April, 1871. 
1 « Darwinism in Morals, 
