For science may press her devotees into as many different pursuits as there are starting-points to an azimuth circle, and command them to search and find out the ultimate causes of things in the universe, but the forever narrowing circle in one direction, and the forever widening one in the other, would utterly baffle all their attempted research. Whether they descended into the microscopic world, with its myriad-thronged conditions of life, or passed upward and outward, in _Sirius-_distances, to the irresolvable nebulæ, where other and perhaps brighter stars might burst upon their view--gleaming coldly and silently down the still enormous fissures and chasms in the heavens--the result would be the same. Wider and wider fields of observation might open upon their view, as the stellar swarms thickened and the power of human vision failed, but the uranological expedition would return no wiser than when it started, and Science would still be confronted with the same illimitability of space, the same infinitude of matter, and the same incomprehensibility of the world-arranging intelligence that lies beyond. For He who hath garnished the heavens by his spirit--who divideth the sea with his power, and hangeth the earth upon nothing--"_holdeth back the face of his throne and spreadeth his cloud upon it_." What if, in one direction, we should find those inconceivably small specks, or mere bioplastic points, which we call "living matter," or, in the other direction, those inconceivably vast world-forming masses which we call "dead matter," who shall say that "the secret places of the Most High" are not hidden from us, or that when the spirit of God first moved through these vast fissures and chasms in the heavens upon the face of all matter, there was not imparted to it that "animating principle of life" of which the biblical genesis speaks, and which we everywhere see manifesting itself in nature? Surely this inquiry is not one to be superciliously set aside by the materialists, after the failure of their uranological expedition, on the ground that it does not furnish food enough for scientific contemplation, without such physiological fancies as their specialists have been giving us in the shape of force-correlations and molecular theories of life.