112 Analysis of Scientific Books. 



With common sense and Newton, all first formations are 

 creations, and by that term he denoted them. Were it other- 

 wise, there would be formations before first formations, which 

 is absurd. Deluc would not use the term created., because, 

 said he, " in physics, I ought not to employ expressions which 

 are not thoroughly understood between men." Our author 

 reprobates his conduct and his argument with just severity. 

 " Was he aware," says Mr. Penn, " that in excluding the word, 

 he at the same time excluded the idea associated with that 

 word ; and, together with the idea, the principle involved in that 

 idea — the exclusion of which is the very parent cause of all 

 materialism and all atheism ?" 



It was the all-sufficiency ascribed by the mineral geology to 

 physical impressions, or what it denominates phenomena, to 

 determine the great question of the mode of the first formation 

 of mineral substances, that induced it to check its analytical 

 progress, short of the end to which it ought to have pursued it. 

 Our author, therefore, proceeds to shew how insufficient pheno- 

 mena alone are to determine that-question. 



If a bone of the first created man now remained, and were mingled with 

 other bones, pertaining to a generated race ; and if it were to he submitted to 

 the inspection and examination of an anatomist, what opinion and judg- 

 ment would its sensible phenomena suggest, respecting the mode of its first 

 formation, and what would be his conclusion ? If he were unapprized of 

 its true origin, his mind would see nothing in its sensible phenomena, but the 

 laws of its ossification ; just as the mineral geology " sees nothing in the 

 details of the formation of minerals, but precipitations, crystallizations, and 

 dissolutions." He would therefore naturally pronounce of this bone, as of 

 all other bones, that " its fibres were originally soft," until, in the shelter 

 of the maternal womb, it acquired " theliardness of a cartilage, and then 

 of bone ;" that this effect " was not produced at once, or in a very short 

 lime," but by degrees ; " that after birth, it increased in hardness, by the 

 continual addition of ossifying matter, until it ceased to grow at all." 



Physically true as this reasoning would appear, it would nevertheless be 

 morally and really false ; because it concluded from mere sensible phenomena, 

 to the certainty of a fact which could not be established by the evidence of 

 sensible phenomena ahne ; namely, the mode of the first formation of the 

 substance of created bone. 



From hence we obtain a second principle, with respect to such hrst for- 

 mations by creation, that their sensible phenomena alone cannot determine 

 the mode of their formation, since the real mode was in direct contradiction 

 to the sensible indications of those phenomena. 



The same ingenious argument is then applied to vegetable 

 first formations, and thejust inference deduced from both — that, 

 from phenomena alone, physics can determine nothing " con- 

 cerning the mode of the first formations of the first individuals 

 composing either the animal or vegetable kingdoms of matter." 



Nor are they " a whit more competent to dogmatize concerning 

 the mode of first formations, from the evidence of phenomena 

 alone, in the mineral kingdom, or to infer that it was more gra- 

 dual, or slower, than those of the other two. For," continuing 

 the comparison, and transferring it to created mineral matter, 

 ' the sensible phenomena which suggest crystallization to the 



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