^6 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE 



lighten our darkness. On both sides of the zone here 

 assigned to the materialist he is equally helpless. If you 

 ask him whence is this "Matter" of which we have been 

 discoursing — who or what divided it into molecules, who 

 or what impressed upon them this necessity of running 

 into organic forms — he has no answer. Science is mute 

 in reply to these questions. But if the materialist is con- 

 founded and science rendered dumb, who else is prepared 

 with a solution ? To whom has this arm of the Lord 

 been revealed? Let us lower our heads, and acknowl- 

 edge our ignorance, priest and philosopher, one and all. 



Perhaps the mystery may resolve itself into knowledge 

 at some future day. The process of things upon this 

 earth has been one of amelioration. It is a long way 

 from the Iguanodon and his contemporaries to the Presi- 

 dent and Members of the British Association. And 

 whether we regard the improvement from the scientific 

 or from the theological point of view — as the result of 

 progressive development, or of successive exhibitions of 

 creative energy — neither view entitles us to assume that 

 man's present faculties end the series, that the process of 

 amelioration ends with him. A time may therefore come 

 when this ultra- scientific region, by which we are now 

 enfolded, may offer itself to terrestrial, if not to human, 

 investigation. Two- thirds of the rays emitted by the sun 

 fail to arouse the sense of vision. The rays exist, but 

 the visual organ requisite for their translation into light 

 does not exist. And so from this region of darkness and 

 mystery which surrounds us, rays may now be darting 

 which require but the development of the proper intel- 

 lectual organs to translate them into knowledge as far 

 surpassing oars, as ours surpasses that of the wallowing 



