6 
ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS. 
author presume to speak of moral laws. The laws of mind, too, 
he is unable to consider. Laws as governing evolution in nature, 
and as directing political and social phenomena, do not admit of 
treatment within the limits of an hour’s address. The laws to 
which attention is now invited are, generally, those, and, specially, 
illustrations of those, by which are maintained the structures of 
man himself and of the whole of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, 
this world and its investing atmosphere, and indeed the whole of 
the visible universe. Further, it will be obvious, from what has 
already been stated, that by the word law is to be understood that 
which is decreed , whether by the human for the human, by the 
superhuman for the human and for the animate generally, or by 
the superhuman for the inanimate. Frequently only those 
particular decrees or greater natural truths which admit of 
expression in mathematical terms are regarded as laws, lesser 
truths being named principles and generalisations, while afterwards 
come those more localised truths known as properties of matter or of 
force. The property of indestructibility of matter and of force is, 
however, so universal, so important, so great a link between cause 
and effect, so great a truth—a truth decreed to govern all matter 
and all force—that it would seem to be as much a law or decree as 
any of the great general truths that admit of statement in terms of 
time or space or number, and it therefore will here be so treated. 
Of the Laws of God in Nature, as thus defined, perhaps the first to 
strike the enquiring mind is that of the indestructibility of matter 
by any means known to us or of which we can conceive. You 
throw a letter into the fire, it burns, and you say you have destroyed 
it. But is it really destroyed ? As a letter, it is. The form of the 
thing has been destroyed, no doubt. It is easy to alter the form of 
matter. But is one single particle of the matter of which the sheet 
of paper consisted actually destroyed ? Not one. Is one particle 
of the paper, wood, coal, coke, charcoal, or whatever you put into 
your fire-grates and furnaces destroyed ? Not one. Burn twelve 
parts—pounds or grains, say pounds—burn twelve pounds of coke, 
pure coke, that is, coke without ash. Or, which is tantamount, 
ascertain the proportion of ash or other extraneous matter in the 
crude coke, and, allowing for this, thoroughly burn so much of the 
crude coke as contains twelve pounds of pure coke. The coke will 
make a clear fire, the product of the combustion, which passes up 
the chimney, being invisible. Though invisible, however, it is per¬ 
fectly tangible and capable of producing very tangible effects ; for 
if you burned the coke in a room without a chimney you would 
be suffocated by the same invisible product of combustion. Now 
