514 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



by smelting. The air we breathe, though not a compound, is a mixture. The 

 water which is essential to our life is a compound. And, if we pass from inor- 

 ganic to organic substances, all vegetables and animals are compound, sustained 

 by various articles of food which go to make up their frames. Now, how have 

 these compounds been formed? It is quite possible that some of them, or all of, 

 them to some extent, may have been formed from the first. If Science could go 

 back to the beginning of all things, which it obviously can not, it might find the 

 composition already accomplished, and be compelled to start with it as a given 

 fact — a fact as incapable of scientific explanation as the existence of matter at all. 

 But, on the other hand, composition and decomposition is a matter of every-day 

 experience. Our very food could not nourish us except by passing through 

 these processes in our bodies ; and by the same processes we prepare much of our 

 food before consuming it. May not Science go back to the time when these 

 processes had not yet begun? May not the starting-point of the history of the 

 universe be a condition in which the simple elements were still uncombined? If 

 Science could go back to the beginning of all things, might we not find all the 

 elements of material things ready indeed for the action of the inherent forces 

 which would presently unite them in an infinite variety of combinations, but as 

 yet still separate from each other ? Scattered through enormous regions of space, 

 but drawn together by the force of gravitation ; their original heat, whatever it 

 may have been, increased by their mutual collision ; made to act chemically on 

 one another by such increase or by subsequent decrease of temperature ; per- 

 petually approaching nearer to the forms into which, by the incessant action of 

 the same forces, the present universe has grown — these elements, and the work- 

 ing of the several laws of their own proper nature, may be enough to account 

 scientifically for all the phenomena that we observe. We do not even then get back 

 to regularity. Why these elements, and no others ; why in these precise quanti- 

 ties; why so distributed in space; why endowed with these properties: still are 

 questions which Science can not answer, and there seems no reason to expect that 

 any scientific answer will ever be possible. Nay, I know not whether it may 

 not be asserted that the impossibility of answering one at least among these ques- 

 tions is capable of demonstration. For the whole system of things, as far as we 

 know it, depends on the perpetual rotation of the heavenly bodies ; and without 

 original irregularity in the distribution of matter no motion of rotation could ever 

 have spontaneously arisen. And, if this irregularity be thus original, Science 

 can give no account of it. Science, therefore, will have to begin with assuming 

 certain facts for which it can never hope to account. But it may begin by assum- 

 ing that, speaking roughly, the universe was always very much what we see it 

 now, and that composition and decomposition have always nearly balanced each 

 other, and that there have been from the beginning the same sun and moon and 

 planets and stars in the sky, the same animals on the earth and in the seas, the 

 same vegetation, the same minerals ; and that though there have been incessant 

 changes, and possibly all these changes in one general direction, yet these changes 

 have never amounted to what would furnish a scientific explanation of the form 



