Whatever it may have been with Lamarck, it is certain, in the case of the author of the “Vestiges,” that the speculations originating in the nebular hypothesis lie at the foundation of all his philosophy. This Essay would never have been executed, as it could not even have been imagined, but for the data so abundantly supplied by a universal star-dust lettering, filling all space and inscribed over all time. But change the names, and it is only the atoms of Democritus and the vortices of Descartes that constitute the elements, one and all, of the modern cosmogony. Cicero in his first and second books “De Natura Deorum,” has given a full and ample refutation of the former; and his merit is the greater, when it is considered that the inductive methods of philosophizing were not in use nor even guessed at in his time. The argument, as quaintly translated in Ray’s “Wisdom of Creation,” is thus stated—“If the works of nature are better, more exact and perfect, than the works of art, and art effects nothing without reason, neither can the works of nature be thought to be effected without reason; for is it not absurd and incongruous, that when thou beholdest a statue or curious picture, thou shouldst acknowledge that art was used to the making of it; or, when thou seest the course of a ship upon the waters thou shouldst not doubt but the motion of it is regulated and directed by reason and art; or, when thou considerest a SUN-DIAL or CLOCK, thou shouldst understand presently, that the hours are shown by art and not by chance; and yet imagine or believe, that the world, which comprehends all these arts and artificers, was made without counsel or reason? If one should carry into Scythia or Britain such a sphere as our friend Posidonius lately made, each of whose conversions did the same thing in the sun and moon and other five planets, which we see effected every night and day in the heavens, who among those barbarians would doubt that that sphere was composed by reason and art?” The inhabitants of this island are no longer the “barbarians.” The Scythians still are so, and have ever been. Upon the development hypothesis, might we not pause to ask, has our intellectual, and moral, and social progress affected our physical condition so as in aught to change the organic relation of the two nations, barbarous both in the time of Cicero?