CREATION BY LAW. 279 
hundreds of cases in which that adjustment and develop- 
ment do not occur. No doubt when one adjustment is 
absent another takes its place, because no organism can 
continue to exist that is not adjusted to its environ- 
ment; and unceasing variation with unlimited powers 
of multiplication, in most cases, furnish the means 
of self-adjustment. The world is so constituted, that 
by the action of general laws there is produced the 
greatest possible variety of surface and of climate; 
and by the action of laws equally general, the greatest 
possible variety of organisms have been produced, 
adapted to the varied conditions of every part of the 
earth. The objector would probably himself admit, 
that the varied surface of the earth—the plains and 
valleys, the hills and mountains, the deserts and vol- 
canoes, the winds and currents, the seas and lakes 
and rivers, and the various climates of the earth—are 
all the results of general laws acting and re-acting 
during countless ages; and that the Creator does not 
appear to guide and control the action of these laws 
—here determining the height of a mountain, there 
altering the channel of a river—here making the rains 
more abundant, there changing the direction of a 
current. He would probably admit that the forces of 
inorganic nature are self-adjusting, and that the result 
necessarily fluctuates about a given mean condition 
(which is itself slowly changing), while within certain 
limits the greatest possible amount of variety is pro- 
duced. If then a “contriving mind” is not neces- 
sary at every step of the process of change eternally 
