particular facts;--we find all full wisdom, and harmony, and beauty: and all this wise selection of means, this harmonious combination of laws, this beautiful symmetry of relations, directed, with no exception which human investigation has yet discovered, to the preservation, the diffusion, the well-being of those living things, which, though of their nature we know so little, we cannot doubt to be the worthiest objects of the Creator’s care. FINIS. FOOTNOTES: [1] Loudon, Encyclopædia of Gardening, 848. [2] Dec. Phys. vol. ii. 478. [3] Fleming, Zool. i. 400. [4] Rapports du Physique et du Moral de l’Homme, II. 371. [5] It will be observed that it is not here asserted that the difference of native products depends on the difference of climate _alone_. [6] The resemblance consists in this; that we have a strip of greater temperature accompanied by a strip of smaller temperature, these strips arising from the diurnal and nocturnal impressions respectively, and being in motion; as in the waves on a canal, we have a moving strip of greater elevation accompanied by a strip of smaller elevation. We do not here refer to any hypothetical undulations in the fluid matter of heat. [7] Loudon, 1219. [8] Loudon, 1214. [9] Manchester Memoirs, v. 357. [10] Howard on the climate of London, vol. ii. pp. 216, 217. [11] Daniell, Meteor. Ess. p. 56. [12] Daniell. p. 129. [13] Phil. Trans. 1821. [14] Mr. Gough in Manch. Mem. vol. v. [15] The reader who is acquainted with the two theories of light, will perceive that though we have adopted the doctrine of the ether, the greater part of the arguments adduced would be equally forcible, if expressed in the language of the theory of emission. [16] Or rather through the _focal centre_ of the eye, which is always near the centre of the pupil. [17] Laplace, Expos. du Syst. du Monde, p. 441. [18] In this statement of Laplace, however, one remarkable provision for the stability of the system is not noticed. The planets Mercury and Mars, which have much the largest eccentricities among the old planets, are those of which the masses are much the smallest. The mass of Jupiter is more than two thousand times that of either of these planets. If the orbit of Jupiter were as eccentric as that of Mercury is, all the security for the stability of the system, which analysis has yet pointed out, would disappear. The earth and the smaller planets might in that case change their approximately circular orbits into very long ellipses, and thus might fall into the sun, and fly off into remote space.