86 
ON LIFE AND ORGANIZATION. 
years, and probably for a thousand, or more ; but in every case 
there is a limit ; and there is not in nature one production, be it 
magnificent or be it minute, which does not proclaim that it is a 
mere work, and not the original worker. 
Nor is this confined to those temporary productions to which 
we have alluded ; for we have it on the record of eternal truth, 
that “ the earth shall wax old as doth a garment, and the elements 
shall melt with fervent heat.” But it is not said, even here, that 
those elements shall return to that original nothing out of which 
they were called by the voice of Creative Power. All is in his 
keeping ; and, visible or invisible, not one atom can perish with- 
out the exercise of the same power which originally called it into 
existence. 
The heavens may “ pass away as a scroll when it is rolled to- 
gether;” and suns and systems, more than mortal tongue can num- 
ber, may be blotted out from the ken of all created beings ; but if 
He should say, “ Return !” they must return in all the freshness 
of young beauty, and all the vigour of young life : and what tongue 
can say, that the march of creation, even on this our globe, has 
yet arrived at the furthest limits of its progress ? “ Who can say 
that the powers of nature are exhausted, and that the Creator will 
not call new beings from her fertile womb 1 We cannot say so. 
Revolution has succeeded revolution ; races have been successively 
annihilated, to give place to others. Other revolutions may yet 
succeed ; and man, the self-styled lord of the creation, be swept 
from the surface of the earth, to give place to beings as much 
superior to him as he is to the most elevated of the brutes*.” 
The short experience of a few thousand years — a mere drop in 
the ocean of eternity — is insufficient to warrant a contrary con- 
ohision; still less will the contemplation of past creation, and the 
existing constitution of nature, justify the proud assumption, that 
man is the sole end and subject of this grand system of animal 
existence. 
There is, as I said before, a constant change going on in bodies 
around us, above us, and below us ; and although we cannot bring 
so vast and shadowy a subject within the limits of our narrow 
science, so as to make it matter of calculation, “ yet as an animal t 
produces only a limited number of broods, and dies — a tree a limited 
number of crops of fruit, and withers, dries, and falls to the ground ; 
so, after a certain succession of changes, the number of which we 
cannot know, a continent may, probably must, be gathered to its 
last home in the deep. So, after the production and the ruin of a 
certain number of continents, a planet may be no longer fit for the 
* Cuvier. 
f Mudie. 
