164 ESSAYS. 



naturalists of the present day, that hardly a discourse can be 

 pronounced or an investigation prosecuted without reference 

 to them. I suppose that the views here taken are little, if at 

 all, in advance of the average scientific mind of the day. I 

 cannot regard them as less noble than those which they are 

 succeeding. 



An able philosophical writer, Miss Frances Power Cobbe, 

 has recently and truthfully said : 1 



" It is a singular fact, that when we can find out how any- 

 thing is done, our first conclusion seems to be that God did 

 not do it. No matter how wonderful, how beautiful, how in- 

 timately complex and delicate has been the machinery which 

 has worked, perhaps for centuries, perhaps for millions of 

 ages, to bring about some beneficent result, if we can but 

 catch a glimpse of the wheels its divine character disappears." 



I agree with the writer that this first conclusion is prema- 

 ture and unworthy, — I will add, deplorable. Through what 

 faults or infirmities of dogmatism on the one hand, and skep- 

 ticism on the other, it came to be so thought, we need not 

 here consider. Let us hope, and I confidently expect, that it 

 is not to last ; that the religious faith which survived without 

 a shock the notion of the fixity of the earth itself may equally 

 outlast the notion of the absolute fixity of the species which 

 inhabit it ; that in the future even more than in the past, 

 faith in an order, which is the basis of science, will not — as 

 it cannot reasonably — be dissevered from faith in an Or- 

 dainer, which is the basis of religion. 



APPENDIX. 



I. 



In the following table the names in the left-hand column are from 

 my " Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States," and 

 from Dr. Chapman's " Flora of the Southern United States," the 

 two together comprehending the flora of the Atlantic United States 

 east of the Mississippi River. Alpine plants on the one hand, and 

 subtropical plants on the other, are excluded. 



1 "Darwinism in Morals," in "Theological Review," April, 1871. 



