preconceived plan of construction is the most rational, the most in accordance with probability, because it best meets the requirements of the case. These requirements were that the proportions, arrangements, and relations of the different bodies composing one grand mechanism, should be such that the laws of gravitation and motion would operate upon and among them so as to keep them in uniform and unvarying movement. KOSMICOS. Very well. You have now come to the end of your reasoning. Tell me, then, why it is not just as rational a supposition that the Deity conceived of the plan of the solar system as a product that would result, and that he intended should result, from the operation of his fixed laws of matter and motion, and then left it to the unerring certainty of their operation to produce the mechanism by the process of gradual evolution? SOPHEREUS. The being who is supposed to hold and exercise supreme power over the universe, holds a power to execute, by direct and special creation, any design which he conceives and proposes to accomplish. I am prepared to concede that the process of gradual evolution can produce and apparently has produced some results. But when we are looking for the probable methods of the Deity in the production of such a mechanism as the solar system, we must recognize the superior probability of the direct method, because the indirect method which you describe as gradual evolution does not seem adequate to the production of such a system of bodies. If we could obtain facts which could have any tendency to show that, without any special interposition, the mechanism of the solar system, or any part of it, is a mere result of the working of the laws of gravitation and motion upon a mass of crude matter, we might yield assent to the probability of that occurrence. But of course we have no such facts; we have nothing but theories; and therefore there appears nothing to exclude the probable truth of a special creation. KOSMICOS. We shall not convince each other. You have stated your conclusions concerning the solar system fairly enough, and I have endeavored to answer them. But now let me understand how you propose to apply them to other departments of Nature, in which we have means of closer investigation. You will find it very difficult, I imagine, to maintain that every organism, every plant, animal, fish, insect, or bird, is a special creation, or even that man himself is.