438 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 
system, Kant and Laplace came to the conclusion that its 
various bodies once formed parts of the same undislocated 
mass; that matter in a nebulous form preceded matter in 
its present form; that as the ages rolled away, heat was 
wasted, condensation followed, planets were detached; 
and that finally the chief portion of the hot cloud 
reached, by self-compression, the magnitude and density 
of our sun. The earth itself offers evidence of a fiery 
origin; and in our day the hypothesis of Kant and Laplace 
receives the independent countenance of spectrum analysis, 
which proves the same substances to be common to the 
earth and sun. 
Accepting some such view of the construction of our 
system as probable, a desire immediately arises to connect 
the present life of our planet with the past. We wish to 
know something of our remotest ancestry. On its first 
detachment from the central mass, life, as we understand 
it, could not have been present on the earth. How, then, 
did it come there? The thing to be encouraged here is 
a reverent freedom a freedom preceded by the hard 
discipline which checks licentiousness in speculation 
while the thing to be repressed, both in science and out 
of it, is dogmatism. And here I am in the hands of the 
meeting willing to end, but ready to go on. I have no 
right to intrude upon you, unasked, the unformed 
notions which are floating like clouds, or gathering to 
more solid consistency, in the modern speculative scientific 
mind. But if you wish me to speak plainly, honestly, and 
undisputatiously, I am willing to do so. On the present 
occasion 
You are ordained to call, and I to come. 
Well, your answer is given, and I obey your call. 
Two or three years ago, in an ancient London college, I 
listened to a discussion at the end of a lecture by a very 
remarkable man. Three or four hundred clergymen were 
present at the lecture. The orator began with the civiliza- 
tion of Egypt in the time of Joseph; pointing out the very 
perfect organization of the kingdom, and the possession of 
chariots, in one of which Joseph rode, as proving a long 
antecedent period of civilization. He then passed on to 
the mud of the Nile, its rate of augmentation, its present 
thickness, and the remains of human handiwork found 
