But we proceed:—“A wonder then it must needs be,” continues the philosopher, “that there should be any man found so stupid and forsaken of reason, as to persuade himself that this most beautiful and adorned world was or could be produced by the fortuitous concourse of atoms. He that can prevail with himself to believe this, I do not see why he may not as well admit, that if there were made innumerable figures of the one-and-twenty letters,—in gold suppose or any other metal,—and these well shaken and mixed together, and thrown down from some high place to the ground, they, when they lighted upon the earth, would be so disposed and ranked, that a man might see and read in them Ennius’s Annals; whereas, it were a great chance if he should find one verse thereof among them all: for if this concourse of atoms could make a WHOLE WORLD, why may it not sometimes make, and hath it not somewhere or other in the earth made, a temple, or a gallery, or a portico, or a house, or a city? which yet it is so far from doing, and every man so far from believing, that should any one of us be cast, suppose upon a desolate island, and find there a magnificent palace, artificially contrived according to the exactest rules of architecture, and curiously adorned and furnished, it would never once enter into his head that this was done by an earthquake, or the fortuitous shuffling together of its component materials, or that it had stood there ever since the construction of the world, or first cohesion of atoms; but would presently conclude that there had been some intelligent architect there, the effect of whose art and skill it was. Or, should he find there but one single sheet of parchment or paper, an epistle or oration written full of profound sense, expressed in proper and significant words, illustrated and adorned with elegant phrase,—it were beyond the possibility of the wit of man to persuade him that this was done by the temerarious dashes of an unguided pen, or by the rude scattering of ink upon the paper, or by the lucky projection of so many letters at all adventures; but he would be convinced, by the evidence of the thing at first sight, that there had been not only some man, but some scholar, there.” Now, here let there be but the substitution of a few terms—“fortuitous concourse” for the “nucleated vesicle”—“atoms” that whirl in mazy dance through indefinite time, for the “stardust” revolving through infinite space—“transmutation of species” for “the lucky projection of so many letters”—and the overthrow of the one hypothesis is as ruinously complete as the demolition of the other.