“We have no reason to believe that there is a gap or break anywhere in the operation of the so-called nature. No one can tell precisely where the human leaves off and the animal begins; where the animal leaves off and the vegetable begins; where the organic leaves off and the inorganic begins. There is a gradual development from the simple to the complex, from the lower to the higher, from the inferior to the superior, from the ignorant to the intelligent, from the cruel to the gentle; a gradual merging or gradation from one into the other; the transition at any one point is so slight that it is imperceptible to the human eye. Allow me to say that there never was a _first_ human being, no more than there was a first threshing machine. The mouth of the animal was a very primitive threshing machine; then the mouth and paws together; then the hand; then the flail, then the hand-thresher; then the horse-power, and now the steam-thresher; thus we see that there never was a first thresher, nor was it ever _made_, but gradually developed and improved to its present structure and capacity; so, too, with man. The lower organism out of which man, through the lapse of countless ages, evolved, gradually grew more and more _human like_ from the effects of intercourse with his environment; and this process is still going on. Man is not finished yet. The same forces that have brought him from his primitively low plane to his present relatively high one are elevating him still higher. So we see that man _was_ not _created_, but _is_ still being created, _evolved_; and so with all else. “According to what you call the ‘nebular hypothesis,’ the earth once filled the entire orbit of the moon. The matter composing the earth was then in a rare, highly-heated state, revolving around the sun, from which it was detached and rotated on its axis, which caused the detachment of the matter out of which the moon was formed. “The number of atoms composing the earth, as well as the number of atoms composing the entire solar system, was _practically_ the same then as it is now. Heat, which is the repellent force, kept the atoms and molecules so far apart that the matter composing the earth formed a sphere of nebulous matter, filling the entire orbit of the moon. In like manner did the sun once fill the entire orbit of the earth, and at a preceding time the entire orbit of Neptune. “But some time before this, the earth was even larger than the orbit of the moon. The nebulous matter now composing the earth and the moon, which are now two separate bodies, was once all in the same sphere. By the gradual radiation of heat, the volume, but not the mass, diminished, and the axial rotation increased until a broad concentric ring detached itself. The impulse of the moon’s revolutionary motion was given by the earth’s rotation on its axis.