auxiliary or additional force of their surrounding environment? What endowed _protein_ with its capacity to assume a thousand isomeric forms? What made the favoring conditions which have helped on the influence of its metamorphic tendencies, so as to produce still more sensitive and variously-changeable portions of organic matter? These questions must have an answer; and, when we ask them, we see the significance of the inquiry, "Where wast thou (man) when I laid the foundations of the world?" For these things, on the evolution theory, _are_ the foundations of the world. It is no answer to say, as Mr. Spencer does, that these tendencies, or capacities of matter, and these laws of the favoring conditions, came from the Unknown Cause. Known or unknown, did they have a cause, or did they make themselves? Did these, the foundations of the world, have an origin, or were they without any origin? If they had an origin, was it from the will and power of a being capable of giving existence to them and prescribing their modes of action? If they had no origin, if they existed from all eternity, how came it that they formed this extraordinary habit of invariable action in a certain method, which amid all its multiformity shows an astonishing persistency? If we deny, with Mr. Spencer, the absolute commencement of organic life on the globe, we must still go back of all the traces of organic life, and inquire whence matter, molecules, organized or unorganized, derived the capacities or tendencies to become organized, and how the favoring conditions became established as auxiliary or subsidiary forces. And therefore it is that this difficulty, whether remote or near at hand, is not met by Mr. Spencer: for whether we call the cause an unknown or a known cause, the question is, Was there a cause, or did the foundations of the world lay themselves? The reasoning powers of mankind, exercised by daily observation of cause and effect, of creative power and created product, are equal to the conception of a First Cause as a being who could have laid the foundations of the world, but they are utterly unequal to the conception that they had no origin whatever. Again, consider how numerous are the missing links in the chain of evolution, how many gaps are filled up by pure inventions or assumptions. The evolution of one distinct and perfect animal, or being, out of a pre-existing animal or being of a different type, has never been proved as a fact. Yet whole pedigrees of such generation of species have been constructed upon the same principles as we should construct the pedigree of an individual. Furthermore, if we regard the facts about which there can be no controversy, we find not only distinct species of animals, but we find the same species divided into male and female, with a system of procreation and gestation established for the multiplication of individuals of that species. Now go back to the imaginary period when