102 WALTER AUBREY KIDD^ M.D., M.R.C.S., P.Z.S., ON 



1. General Order of Nature. — In spite of much that conflicts 

 with our limited knowledge of what is best for the existing 

 world, in spite of seeming waste of life, and failure to live 

 among lower organisms, in spite of the long-drawn tale of 

 human woe so strangely mingled with human triumphs and 

 happiness, it is impossible to contemplate the spectacle of the 

 course of this world, illumined by the increasing light of 

 Eeligion and Science, without a conviction which no arguments 

 can shake, that order is the essential feature of the unfolding 

 drama. The ancients required to describe this scheme of 

 things, and they called it by a name which signified order ; 

 tacitly reasoning that, from the immense preponderance of 

 order observed by them among natural phenomena, the 

 remainder was certainly also governed by the same principle. 

 It may be said that they knew so little of what modern 

 Science has established, so little of the mode of production, 

 the geography and geological history of this planet, to say 

 nothing of the vast host of Heaven, so little of the structure 

 and life-history of plants and animals, or of the laws of 

 chemistry and physics, that we are not compelled to give 

 much weight to their views of things. Nevertheless, for clear, 

 deep thinking on the data presented to them the Greek and 

 Eastern sages were giants to men of modern times. The 

 whole course of discovery since the early philosophers has 

 been to display a marvellous extension of tlie world of purpose, 

 in the orderly development of the conditions of life, and of the 

 inhabitants to require them, the interdependence of plants and 

 animals, the regular march of the seasons of the year, the 

 recurring round of day and night, varying climates of the 

 globe, the due proportions of land and water, the fixity of the 

 composition of the terrestrial atmosphere, and the general 

 uniformity of nature. The very fact that with the exceptions 

 of the Divine will and the human will the course of nature is 

 uniform, that every new discovery only adds one more tittle 

 of evidence to the overwhelming bulk which confronts the 

 modern scientist ; that a small group of human beings, existing 

 during a few paltry hundreds of years on this particular small 

 planet, are able to formulate laws of nature, which, whether 

 invariable or not, are nearly so, and which dictate terms 

 of existence and motion to the furthest stars — such a fact 

 alone is an irrefragable proof that order, and calculated order 

 of a transcendent kind, is immanent in the existing state of 

 things. If it were really true that the globe and its inhabitants 

 were pictured by the evolution of an individual ovum to a full- 



