74 
with reference to the distances of the stars and nebulas, and 
the structure of the stellar universe. Sir W . Herschel, in his 
earlier papers, assumed a near equality in the absolute size of 
the stars, and accounted for their unequal light by unequal 
distance alone. Hence enormous estimates of the remoteness 
of the smaller stars and the nebulae, reaching to sixty or 
a hundred thousand years of the journey of light. But since 
difference of apparent brightness may arise either from real 
diversity of size or from greater distance, the reasonable course, 
till deciding evidence is obtained, is to share the effect equally 
between the two causes. On this view the high estimates of 
thirty, sixty, or a hundred thousand years of light, will 
reduce themselves to others of 300, 420, and 550 years. 
Herschel’ s own discovery of binary and multiple stars did 
much to set aside the basis of his earlier speculations. The 
Magellanic clouds yielded further evidence against them. All 
recent discovery has tended in the same line, to prove that 
physical relations exist between stars very unequal in size, or 
stars and nebulae. The spectroscope is fast completing the 
same revolution in our view of the stellar universe. And 
Mr. Proctor has shown in another way that “the brilliancy of 
stars is no satisfactory criterion of their proximity/’ 
The uncertainties and errors on which I have dwelt belong to 
physics, and its most advanced and certain portion, astronomy. 
The same nebulous character must apply still more to geology, 
where the data are far more complex ; and most of all to 
physiology, and the sciences that deal with life and living 
creatures. Here the growth of conjectures, claiming the name 
of science, and falsely so called, has been surprising and pro- 
digious. A whole school of physiologists have arisen, who can 
persuade themselves, and try to force their own conviction on 
others, that the many thousand existing or extinct species ot 
animals have been developed out of each other, by gradual 
change, through intermediate forms a thousandfold more nu- 
merous. And yet of these millions of sub-species, bridging over 
the ten thousand intervals of known species, no single speci- 
men now survives, or has been found in the immense number 
of the actual fossils of geology. Such a view is more like 
madness reduced to method than the sober and deliberate 
verdict of reasonable men. But it relieves those who hold 
it from a bugbear which alarms and repels them, the need 
of any 'special acts of creation by an intelligent Author and 
Maker of the universe. 
Now even in astronomy, where there is the largest nucleus 
of solid truth, how much remains nebulous and obscure ! The 
