4: THE ORIGIN OF CREATION 1 . 



originally a universal " Fire Mist," which gradually cooled off 

 into suns and planets. How fire mist could cool when there 

 was nothing to cool it, and how one substance could change 

 without coming in contact with another, is inconceivable to us. 



In the same book we find that there are fifty-five simple 

 elements composing the earth. 



But in an article on the "Materials of the Universe" in 

 Eraser's Magazine 1869, we find there are sixty-two elements, 

 of which forty-nine are metals, eight are substances with an 

 individual character of their own, and five are gases. They can 

 however be resolvable into the two classes of mineral and 

 vegetable. The author of the above mentioned article says : 

 " "We cannot affirm it to be matter of demonstration that none 

 of these may be some day found reducible to a more simple 

 form. We cannot pronounce with mathematical confidence, 

 that no unexpected and startling discovery may yet effect at 

 least a partial change iu some of these positions. But we may 

 safely affirm, that the probability of any general revolution is 

 infinitesimally small." 



It remains for our readers to judge whether it has not now 

 become a certainty. 



"We find the nearest approach to our views on the composition 

 of matter, in Park's Chemical Catechism ; where, after showing 

 that plants may be grown in sand, litharge, and even in 

 common lead shot, merely by moistening them with water, it 

 concludes : " Oxygen and Hydrogen, with the assistance of 

 solar light, appear to be the only elementary substances 

 employed in the constitution of the whole universe, and nature 

 in her simple process, works the most infinitely diversified 



