138 THE INStTPFIOIENOY OF PHYSICAL LAW. 



builds railroads, cats canals, paints pictures, carves 

 statues. Physical law, compelled by man, its master to 

 produce them, waits till his hand is removed, and then 

 destroys them. 



Long before man appeared on our planet, it was clothed 

 in vegetation and "peopled" with animals. For these,also, 

 physical law needed to be supplemented by some power 

 outside of itself ; a will and an intelligence that can make 

 the forces of nature work under their direction. If 

 physical laws cannot compel the elements that form a 

 house, to take their places in the brick walls, and timber 

 floors, and in the lath and plaster of its ceilings, or in 

 the slate and tin of its roof, the glass of its windows, and 

 the metal of its pipes, still less are they able to make the 

 carbon, the hydrogen, the oxygen, the potassium and 

 other elements that compose a tree, adjust themselves in 

 bark, and wood, leaves and fruit, in sap and the tubes 

 that carry it, the open mouthed rootlets that let it in, 

 and the myriad outlets through which the surplus water 

 and the rejected oxygen flow out into the atmosphere. 

 Phj'^sical laws are powerless to do this, and yet all this is 

 done, and a thousand fold more. Hence, if a controlling 

 will and intelligence are needed in order that a house 

 should be possible, a fortiori, they are required that a 

 tree should be possible, and so through the whole vast 

 range of organic forms. 



To this it may be answered that my list of physical 

 laws is too limited ; that there are many other laws, as 

 for example the law of youth, maturity, and old age ; the 

 law that like produces like, wheat produces wheat and 

 not barley ; the oak does not produce an apple tree ; the 

 young of every species is like its parents. And then 

 there is the law of assimilation, that food becomes part 

 of the plant or animal that consumes it. The grass or 

 grain that enters a swine, becomes pork; that which en- 

 ters the ox, becomes beef. The flesh of the timid sheep 



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