You will see, therefore, that the idea of a Creator, fashioning a type of animal organism, or making a commencement of organic life, is excluded by this great philosopher, although he does concur in the main in Darwin's general explanation of the mode in which one organism is evolved out of a pre-existing organism. He goes much farther, because his system of universal evolution embraces the elements out of which any organic life whatever has been developed, and negatives the idea of any absolute commencement of anything whatever. He begins with the original molecules of organizable matter. By modifications induced upon modifications these become formed, by their inherent tendencies, into higher types of organic molecules, as we see in the artificial evolution effected by chemists in their laboratories; who, although they are unable to form the complex combinations directly from their elements, can form them indirectly through successive modifications of simpler combinations, by the use of equivalents. In Nature, the more complex combinations are formed by modifications directly from the elements, and each modification is a change of the molecule into equilibrium with its environment, subjecting it, that is to say, to new conditions. Then, larger aggregates, compound molecules, are successively generated; more complex or heterogeneous aggregates arise out of one another, and there results a geometrically increasing multitude of these larger and more complex aggregates. So that by the action of the successive higher forms on one another, joined with the action of the environing conditions, the highest forms of organic molecules are reached. Thus in the early world, as in the modern laboratory, inferior types of organic substances, by their mutual actions under fit conditions, evolved the superior types of organic substances, and at length ended in organizable protoplasm. Now, let me read to you Mr. Spencer's description of the mode in which the substance called "protein" becomes developed into organic life. "And it can hardly be doubted," he says, "that the shaping of organizable protoplasm, which is a substance modifiable in multitudinous ways with extreme facility, went on after the same manner. As I learn from one of our first chemists, Prof. Frankland, protein is capable of existing under probably at least a thousand isomeric forms; and, as we shall presently see, it is capable of forming, with itself and other elements, substances yet more intricate in composition, that are practically intricate in their varieties of kind. Exposed to those innumerable modifications of conditions which the earth's surface afforded, here in amount of light, there in amount of heat, and elsewhere in the mineral quality of its aqueous medium, this extremely changeable substance must have undergone, now one, now another, of its countless metamorphoses. And to the mutual influences of its metamorphic forms, under favoring conditions, we may ascribe