We are not yet come to the existence of a school of philosophers who explicitly deny a Creator: but we are on the way, though common sense may interpose. There are always straws which show the direction of the wind. I have before me the printed letter of a medical man--to whose professional ability I have good testimony--who finds the vital principle in highly rarefied oxygen. With the usual logic of such thinkers, he dismisses the "eternal personal identity" because "If soul, spirit, mind, which are merely modes of sensation, be the attribute or function of nerve-tissue, it cannot possibly have any existence apart from its material organism!" How does he know this _impossibility_? If all the mind _we_ know be from nerve-tissue, how does it appear that mind in other planets may not be another thing? Nay, when we come to _possibilities_, does not his own system give a queer one? If highly rarefied oxygen be vital power, more highly rarefied oxygen {41} may be more vital and more powerful. Where is this to stop? Is it _impossible_ that a finite quantity, rarefied _ad infinitum_, may be an Omnipotent? Perhaps the true Genesis, when written, will open with "In the beginning was an imperial quart of oxygen at 60 deg. of Fahrenheit, and the pressure of the atmosphere; and this oxygen was infinitely rarefied; and this oxygen became God." For myself, my aspirations as to this system are Manichaean. The quart of oxygen is the Ormuzd, or good principle: another quart, of hydrogen, is the Ahriman, or evil principle! My author says that his system explains Freewill and Immortality so obviously that it is difficult to read previous speculations with becoming gravity. My deduction explains the conflict of good and evil with such clearness that no one can henceforward read the New Testament with becoming reverence. The surgeon whom I have described is an early bud which will probably be nipped by the frost and wither on the ground: but there is a good crop coming. Material pneuma is destined to high functions; and man is to read by gas-light. THE SUN AN ELECTRIC SPACE. The solar system truly solved; demonstrating by the perfect harmony of the planets, founded on the four universal laws, the Sun to be an electric space; and a source of every natural production displayed throughout the solar system. By James Hopkins.[82] London, 1849, 8vo. The author says: