DISCLOSURE OF THE SUBJECT. 15 



Or, it may be, there is some mysterious " principle" in the 

 earth which, by some sort of "fermentation," produces 

 these semblances to living forms. Or, still again, as these 

 rocks existed before animals were created, it may be that 

 the Creator moulded these lifeless shapes to serve as " pro- 

 totypes" or " models" from which the living forms of ani- 

 mals were to be copied. Or, who knows, finally, but the 

 old conjecture of Epicurus may be truth ? Since matter 

 must exist in some form, may we not regard these as some 

 of the possible forms under which the particles of matter 

 fortuitously fall? 



So reasoned the world prior to the sixteenth century. 

 But this was when the philosopher sat in his closet and 

 argued how things ought to be, instead of going forth to 

 observe how things are. We have learned to contemplate 

 Nature with a different spirit. We have pulled down the 

 house of many a speculatist about his ears. We have de- 

 molished many a universe constructed of the cobwebs of 

 logic. We do not despise first principles and necessary 

 deductions, but we have discovered a more direct and a 

 more certain way of arriving at a history of the universe. 

 We interrogate the facts which surround us, and have 

 found them able to narrate a history which never entered 

 the imaginations of the schoolmen. The phenomena of 

 Nature are the premises of our reasoning instead of its 

 conclusions. We have learned to look upon Nature with 

 a profounder -respect ; and, though the alphabet of our 

 philosophy be trees, and birds, and rocks, and fossils, and 

 other material things which metaphysics affects to despise, 

 we have found that they combine themselves into a lan- 

 guage freighted with grand conceptions, and rich in utter- 

 ances of the unseen, the high, and the holy. It has been 

 revealed to us that the vast system of Nature is the ex- 

 pression of a divine thought — that the wide, blue, restless 



