Address of John L. LeConte. 251 
This kind of truth can never be revealed to us by the study 
of inorganic aggregations of the universe. The molar, molecu- 
lar and polar forces, by which they are formed, may be 
expressed, so far as science has reduced them to order, by a 
small number of simply formulated laws, indicative neither of 
purpose nor intelligence, when confined within inorganic limits. 
In fact, taking also the organic world into consideration, we as 
ly no progress in animal 
S 
purely physical science is brought to a knowledge of any evi- 
ences of intelligence in the arrangement of the universe. 
The poet, inspired by meditating on the immeasurable abyss 
of space, and the transcendent glories of the celestial orbs, has 
declared, 
“The undevout astronomer is mad.” 
_And his saying had a certain amount of speciousness, 0 
account of the magnitude of the bodies and distances with 
which the student of the stars is concerned. is favorite 
line is, however, only an example of what an excellent writer 
has termed “the unconscious action of volition upon cre- 
dence,” and it is properly in the correlations of the inorganic 
world that we may hope to exhibit, with clearness, the adapta- 
tions of plan prefigured and design executed. 
In the wialode and results of investigation, the mathema- 
tician differs from both the physicist and the biologist. Un- 
confined, like the former, by the few simple relations by which 
movements in the inorganic world are controlled, he may not 
only vary the form of his analysis, almost at pleasure, making 
it more or less transcendental in many directions, but he may 
introduce factors or relations, apparently inconceivable in real 
existence, and then interpret them into results quite as real as 
those of the legitimate calculus with which he is working, but 
lying outside of its domain. 
