the constitutional instincts or inspirations of humanity, with which speculative minds may, indeed, dally for a generation but which are ultimately inexorable." Macvicar maintains with Keely that from God, as the Author of all, nature may be reached with those very features which it is seen to possess; that it is essential to every philosophy, which is or shall be in harmony with intelligence, that it shall be based upon a unity; that no philosophy possesses all the claims to intellectual regard which it may possibly have, unless that unity be an intelligent Being; that to suppose thought and feeling to wake up for the first time in that which was previously blind and dead from all eternity, is nothing short of absurd to those who are led by the evidence of design, to look from nature up to nature's God, in whom all nature lives and moves and has its being. While the protoplasm of the biologist is a substance which is more or less opaque or visible, the protoplasm now conceived of as the material of the whole creation in its first state, when development is to begin, must, on the contrary, be altogether homogeneous and invisible. But none the less is it entitled to the name of protoplasm; nay, it alone must be justly entitled to that name, for it is the first of created things, and, being the product of an Almighty Being, it must be altogether plastic in His hands. It can have no constitution of its own derived from itself; but must, so far as the finite can, with respect to the infinite, reflect, represent, embody, show forth His attributes and being. Still, there is limitation to this. Certain properties and demands with regard to that which exists, with limited extension, in space, are inexorable. Macvicar reasons that with such limitations the primal substance of creation must be fully obedient or assimilated to the Creator--not in a transient manner, but permanently; and that in its nature the primal substance, the true protoplasm, must be an assimilative substance. Granting that this protoplasm be partitioned into individualities, he makes the deduction that each and all of these individualized beings and things would, up to the full measure of their capacity, not only tend to assimilate themselves to the ever-present Being to whom they owe their own being, but they would tend also to assimilate themselves each to itself, with respect both to space and time; as also that they would all tend to assimilate one another. Taking this as the cosmical mode of action, or law, and on the strength of this law alone, without invoking the aid of any other law, he attempts to explain all those phenomena to which the physicist, the chemist, and the biologist usually address themselves. Illustrating the manner in which this law applies itself to phenomena, he gives as the first products of this law the perpetuation of an original mode of existence, and the establishment of permanence of properties under