then, abstaining from all work of further direct creation, left all the other animals to be evolved out of that one by the operation of secondary causes that fail even as a theory to account for what we see, and that can not be traced through any results that have yet been discovered. Wherever we pause in the ascending scale of the Darwinian descent of man, wherever we place the first special act of creative power, whether we put it at the fish-like animal of the most remote antiquity, and call that creature the original progenitor of all the vertebrata, or whether we suppose a special creation to have occurred at the introduction of the mammalian series, or anywhere else, we have to account for changes of system, new constructions, elaborately diversified forms, by the operation of agencies that were incapable of producing the results, if we are to judge of their capacity by anything that we have seen or known of their effects. I will conclude this chapter by expressing as accurately as I can what has struck me as the excessive tendency of modern science to resolve everything into the operation of general laws, or into what we call secondary causes. I may be able to suggest nothing new upon this part of the subject, but I shall at least be able, I hope, to put my own mind in contact with that of the reader by explaining what has impressed me in the speculations of those who lay so much stress upon the potency of general laws to produce the results which we see in Nature. Of course, I do not question the great fact that the infinite Power acts by and through the uniform methods from which we are accustomed to infer what we call laws; which in physics is nothing but a deduction of regularity and system from that which we see to be perpetually and invariably happening. Now, I do not enter here into the question of the tendency of modern science to displace our religious ideas of a special Providence, by attributing everything in Nature to the operation of fixed laws of matter; or its tendency, in other words, to remove the infinite Being at a greater distance from us than that in which our religious feelings like to contemplate him. I am perfectly sensible that in truth the infinite God is just as near to us, when we regard him as acting by general laws and secondary causes, as when we believe him to be exercising a direct and special power. I am equally sensible that it is in the very nature of infinite power, wisdom, and benevolence to be able and willing to ordain uniform and fixed principles of action. That Power which gives to matter all its properties may well be supposed to have established uniformity and regularity of movements, forces, combinations, and qualities. How supremely consistent this uniformity and regularity are, with what stupendous accuracy they are kept forever in operation, we are more or less able to discern; and that benevolence which is believed to accompany the power may well be supposed to have intended