140 The American Geologist. February, 1892 
IV. HIS OTHER WORK—NATURAL THEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY, EDU- 
CATION, HIS POPULAR LECTURES, POETRY. 
It would seem as if early in his professional career Dr. Winchell 
laid down a scheme of philosophical postulates and their conse- 
quences, making 38 in all, and that all his subsequent writings 
and study were directed to the amplification and enforcement of 
this series. All the fundamental ideas of his later works and 
the ratiocination of his maturer years, whether published or un- 
published, may be found in germinal condition in this early 
scheme. These logical steps were published in 1860, in the 
Michigan Journal of Education; **The cycles of matter; or the 
permanence of the earth and the destiny of the race.” In the 
pursuit of this great theme he expanded the realm of geology 
over the entire history of the earth and its inhabitants, and over 
its associated worlds. When the inductive method failed him for 
lack of facts of observation he called to his aid imagination 
guided by logical relations. When he encountered man and ani- 
mate nature, as parts of this cosmos, he sought to adjust them 
to each other and to their origin and destiny in the light of what 
knowledge he had, and when the light was faint he strove to in- 
crease it by reasonable speculation. Among his first writings of 
this kind was a series of articles on ‘‘Christian Theology illus- 
trated from Nature,” published in the Northwestern Christian 
Advocate, at Chicago. He was sensible that in these articles, 
which added much to the Butlerian method of ‘‘Analogy,” there 
was still lacking an essential link, in that the validity of the cos- 
mological argument was assumed rather than proven; he then en- 
gaged on an undertaking which he prosecuted with such diligence 
an 
as his other duties would permit, till the last year of his life 
attempt to establish the validity of the ‘‘argument from design,” 
resulting in a work that he entitled ‘Intellect and Religion,” to 
which he frequently refers as his ‘‘belated work,’ his work ‘‘many 
times begun.” It went through varied evolution in form of 
argument and in its general title, having been begun as ‘‘The 
(reologic Ages,” revived as ‘‘A system of Natural Theology” 
and left with the above title. The work remains unpublished. 
The burden of his educational labor lay in the direction of a 
widening of the avenues of natural science, and its introduction 
