490 
BULLETIN OF THE NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY. 
which she discloses to her (true (worshippers, owe much to the 
gentlemen who plan and 'who effectively provide such delightful 
outing days as w r e had in the year. If there he any pensiveness at 
all, of which I am doubtful, it can be only in ithe hearts of those 
who are not so able as they once were to crawl into dark caves, 
to jump over running brooks, or to climb the steep hills that are 
sometimes encountered in the expeditions, which, when one 
comes up against them suggests a hope that, as in the ballad of 
■the Pied Piper, some mysterious music will open them for us 
and we shall get to the other side without trouble to ourselves. 
In observations which I had the honor to address to the Natural 
History Society a year ago reference was made among other 
things to (that theory of matter — the monistic theory — which dis- 
penses with the idea of a creative force in, or rather outside of, 
the material universe, which finds in matter itself and in mat- 
ter alone all the forces which are sufficient to create worlds, the 
men and animals which live in them, the trees and plants which 
cover them, a theory which “has excluded from the story of the 
earth all questions of miracle, all questions of supernatural 
agencies in the building o i the 'mountains and the shaping of 
continents which practically teaches that it is an arrange 
ment or re-arrangement of the atoms of the universe and their 
relation to each other which makes not alone the material man 
but also the intelligence which man displays and the intellectual 
forces which apparently so strikingly differentiate the matter of 
which he is made up from the matter in 'the blocks and stones 
and insenate things which he can use for his own purposes, which 
things in a general way are supposed to be made for his 
use. 
According to this theory the universe is one great whole 
and the moral and spiritual life of man is a part of this cosmos ; 
there are not two different separate worlds, the one physical and 
material, the other moral and immaterial. This may be held to 
suggest or to suppose a purpose in nature which has not yet been 
discovered by man, which makes him but a simple element in 
natural processes, of no special account in the great drama of 
creation, of no more importance in the general scheme — what- 
ever that scheme may be, if there be a scheme at all — (than the 
