In order to supply the seed-bearing meteoric fragment by which each planet is to be stocked with life, it is necessary, according to Sir W. Thomson, that two worlds—one at least flourishing with life—shall be smashed; and, in order to get them smashed with a sufficient amount of frequency to supply the materials for his hypothesis, the learned President of the British Association has, in accordance with the customary ingenuity of mathematical theorists, worked out the necessary mathematical conditions, and states with unhesitating mathematical assurance that—“It is as sure that collisions must occur between great masses moving through space, as it is that ships, steered without intelligence directed to prevent collision, could not cross and recross the Atlantic for thousands of years with immunity from collision.” The author of the paper in the _Cornhill_ denies this very positively, and without going into the mathematical details, points out the basis upon which it may be mathematically refuted—viz., that all such worlds are traveling in fixed or regular orbits around their primaries or suns, while each of these primaries travels in its own necessary path, carrying with it all its attendants, which still move about him, just as though he had no motion of his own. These are the conclusions of Newtonian dynamics, the sublime simplicity of which contrasts so curiously with the complex dreams of the modern atom-splitters, and which make a further and still more striking contrast by their exact and perfect accordance with actual and visible phenomena. Newton has taught us that there can be no planets traveling at random like the Sir W. Thomson’s imaginary ships with blind pilots, and by following up his reasoning, we reach the conclusion, that among all the countless millions of worlds that people the infinity of space, there is no more risk of collision than there is between any two of the bodies that constitute our own solar system. All the observations of astronomers, both before and since the discovery of the telescope, confirm this conclusion. The long nightly watching of the Chaldean shepherds, the star-counting, star-gauging, star-mapping, and other laborious gazing of mediæval and modern astronomers, have failed to discover any collision, or any motion tending to collision, among the myriads of heavenly bodies whose positions and movements have been so faithfully and diligently studied. Thus, the hypothesis of creation which demands the destruction of two worlds in order to effect the sowing of a seed, is as inconsistent with sound dynamics as it is repugnant to common sense.