exactly an inversion of the historical connection, when Kant’s name is occasionally misused, to recommend that natural philosophy shall leave the inductive method, by which it has become great, to revert to the windy speculations of a so-called ‘deductive method.’ No one would have attacked such a misuse, more energetically and more incisively, than Kant himself if he were still among us. The same hypothesis as to the origin of our planetary system was advanced a second time, but apparently quite independently of Kant, by the most celebrated of French astronomers, Simon, Marquis de Laplace. It formed, as it were, the final conclusion of his work on the mechanism of our system, executed with such gigantic industry and great mathematical acuteness. You see from the names of these two men, whom we meet as experienced and tried leaders in our course, that in a view in which they both agree, we have not to deal with a mere random guess, but with a careful and well-considered attempt to deduce conclusions as to the unknown past from known conditions of the present time. It is in the nature of the case, that a hypothesis as to the origin of the world which we inhabit, and which deals with things in the most distant past, cannot be verified by direct observation. It may, however, receive direct confirmation, if, in the progress of scientific knowledge, new facts accrue to those already known, and like them are explained on the hypothesis; and particularly if survivals of the processes, assumed to have taken place in the formation of the heavenly bodies, can be proved to exist in the present. Such direct confirmations of various kinds have, in fact, been formed for the view we are about to discuss, and have materially increased its probability. Partly this fact, and partly the fact that the hypothesis in question has recently been mentioned in popular and scientific books, in connection with philosophical, ethical, and theological questions, have emboldened me to speak of it here. I intend not so much to tell you anything substantially new in reference to it, as to endeavour to give, as connectedly as possible, the reasons which have led to, and have confirmed it.