Exhibition—Annual addresses. 
6y 
the whole complete. Particles inert and apparently useless in 
themselves, when brought in the mysterious laboratory of nature 
into contact and under the influence of each other, and other and 
dissimilar particles, each becomes a necessary contribution in accom¬ 
plishing the purposes of the whole. So everything in the universe 
has its appropriate place and uses, first as elements and then as or¬ 
ganisms which, when brought by the Creator into one great world, 
made perfection itself worthy of the comprehensive benediction, 
“ It is good.” We learn great lessons from these processes of na¬ 
ture and all the phases of life, and all the accomplishments of or¬ 
ganic society are modeled from the phases and order of the divine 
economy. 
The arguments of ancient philosophy to prove a great first cause 
and sovereign ruler of the universe, were drawn from the evidences 
of a common design and universal law which brought into being 
and control the world of matter and of mind. This was an old 
earth long ages before it was fitted for the habitation of man. It 
came naked from the womb of time. Its cold and rugged surface 
was the bare and solid rock. It had no superficial incrustation of 
earth — no soil containing the embryo elements of vegetable life. 
Its preparation for our abode was, through gradual evolution and 
development, by natural processes and active forces, set in motion 
by the Divine Will, and regulated and controlled by laws as un¬ 
changeable and inflexible as that Will itself. In all the changes 
and mutations by which our earth was thus fitted for the mainte¬ 
nance of animal life, by the apparent accident of fire and flood, 
there runs a design and plan as clearly manifest as in the original 
creation, by the fiat of the Almighty. The first soil was made by 
the detrition and erosion of the rocks by water, ice and fire, by 
which they were disintegrated into pure sand, containing none of 
the elements which could produce and nourish vegetation. It was 
totally destitute of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen, the 
chemical ingredients of plant life. 
These elements then existed only in the circumambient air, to be 
inhaled by the leaf or carried by rain drops to the roots of that first 
crop of vegetation mysteriously begotten, but by natural causes, 
and suspended between earth and sky. These were the air plants 
and masses of the silurian age, the first green promise of shrub 
and tree, of flower and fruit, and of the tender blade and the ri- 
