255 
in accordance witli tlie deliberate judgment of mankind at all 
timeSj and are strictly scientific. 
To tliis deliberate judgment of tlie human race Dr. Haeckel 
opposes himself^ and asserts that matter did originate for 
itself forces ; that matter did make for itself those laws by 
which it is now governed ; so that out of impotency came 
power, and out of disorder came order. Such a belief is, we 
hold, both unreasonable and unscientific. Is not such a creed 
a blind belief How much more reasonable and more 
worthy of acceptance is the doctrine of the direct creation of 
forces and the arrangement of laws by an Almighty Being, 
the great First Cause of life, of order, and of beauty. 
Now, concerning the evolution of the solar system out 
of the Nebulous Fire-dust without the action of a mighty 
will, it may safely be affirmed that there are many circum- 
stances connected with it for which the hypothesis fails to 
account. Thus, to quote the words of Mr. E. A. Proctor, in 
his Expanse of the Heavens, published in 1873, It does not 
account for the strange disposition of the masses of the solar 
system. Why should the inner family consist of minor bodies 
in the main unattended, while the outer consists of giant orbs 
with extensive families of satellites ? Why should the inner- 
most members of the outer family of planets be the largest, 
while just within these lies a family of asteroids, not only 
individually minute, but collectively less than Mars, or even 
Mercury ? Why should the two middle planets of the inner 
family be the largest members of that family ? Laplace^s 
theory gives no account of these peculiarities ; nor perhaps 
could it be insisted that these peculiarities should be explained ; 
yet if any other theory should give an account of these features, 
explaining also the features which we have seen accounted 
for, then such theory would have a decided advantage Now, 
we think the theory that the disposition of the heavenly bodies 
by an almighty Being a more reasonable one. Again : Evo- 
lution does not account for those wonderful laws which govern 
the motions of the members of the solar system, especially 
that of their relative distances, which it was the glory of Kepler 
to have discovered, and which he found to be as follows : — 
The square of one planePs period of revolution round the sun 
is to the square of the next planet’s revolution, as the cube of 
the former planet’s distance from the sun is to the cube of 
the next planet’s distance from the sun. Here, then, is a 
wonderful fact, and one which we challenge the learned pro- 
fessor to account for by evolution, pure and simple. 
In the next place we have to remark that the doctrine of 
