VESTIGES OF CREATIVE LAWS. 123 



side over reproduction operating still in a faint 

 degree in the defective nutrition which stunts, and 

 the favouring conditions which advance and glorify, 

 the state of infancy and youth, so might we expect 

 that the laws which originally spread the vege- 

 table and animal kingdoms over the earth, would 

 still, perhaps, be traceable as faintly at work, espe- 

 cially in those lower families where life and the 

 modifiable quality are most abundantly imparted. 

 The evidence for the existence of such laws is 

 patent to the exact observation which will give it 

 philosophical certaint\% and to such observation I 

 trust it will, in time, be subjected. Meanwhile, I 

 claim its being received as a proAdsional aid to the 

 theory of development. 



Thus closes my review of the objections which 

 have been made to the evidences for an organic 

 creation by law. Such a mode of that creation 

 was, I said at the first, rendered likely by the 

 manifestation of a presidency of law both in the 

 physical an-angements of the imiverse and in the 

 constitution of our own minds. It seemed to me 

 that, with evidences of law in these things, we had 

 a strong probability established that law had been 

 the mode of the divine working in the whole 

 ^2 



