Here, then, is one department of Nature in which it is not necessary and not philosophical to assume that the law of so-called evolution has been the universal law to which all the phenomena of that department are to be attributed. If we follow out the same inquiry in other departments of Nature remote from the animal kingdom, we shall find reason to adopt the same conclusion in respect to their phenomena. Thus, let us for a moment contemplate another of the departments in which inanimate matter is the subject of observation, and in which human will or intelligence has had no agency in producing the phenomena, namely, the formation of the present structure of the earth as it is described by geologists. This is a department in which the hypothesis of evolution finds perhaps its stronghold. Yet it is necessary even here to recognize an intentional plan and direct design in some part of the phenomena. Let us suppose that during the period required by any of the speculations of geologists, however long, a mass of matter was gathered in an unformed condition, and gradually shaped into the present condition of the earth by the action of its constituent elements upon each other, influenced by the laws of mechanical forces, of chemical combinations, of light and heat, and of whatever physical agencies were made to operate in the process of evolving the mass into the condition in which it has been known to us for a certain time. Is it a rational conclusion that the intelligent power which put these forces in operation--an hypothesis with which we must begin to reason, or leave the origin of both matter and forces to blind chance--did not guide their operation at all to the intentional production of the results which we see? The results disclose some manifest purposes; and although these purposes, or others equally beneficent, might have been accomplished by different arrangements, we can see that they have been effected by a certain arrangement of a specific character. The results have been continents, seas, mountains, rivers, lakes, formation and distribution of minerals, growth of forests, and an almost innumerable, and certainly a very varied, catalogue of phenomena, physical formations, and adaptations. All these varied results disclose a plan by which this earth became a marvelously convenient abode for the living creatures that have inhabited or still inhabit it, especially for man. The formation of this plan was an intelligent act, if we suppose that any intelligent being projected the original gathering of the crude primordial matter and subjected it to the operation of the forces employed to shape it into its present condition. This plan was an act of special creation, in the same sense in which the plan of a particular animal organism may have been a special creation. While, therefore, a process which may be called evolution may have operated as the agency through which the earth has