While, therefore, to wild speculations like these nature and geology give no countenance, but demonstrate the reverse to have been the course of creation in all the present, and in every past epoch,—that races, like individuals, have their terms of existence,—that all die out or are violently exterminated,—and that new families are created, adapted to the changes which have taken place, and organically distinct from all that preceded them,—there is, at the same time, a theory of progression and development distinctly traceable in all the divine actings in this world. This view of things is in every stage of it visibly dependent upon His will, as it emanates directly from His appointment, and stands in pleasing contrast to the rationalist phasis of creation. “Wisdom’s artful aim Disposing every part, and gaining still By means proportioned, her benignant end.” CHAPTER III. ANALOGICAL ORDER—PHYSICAL AND MORAL—OF PROGRESSION. The author of the “Vestiges” devotes two chapters to what he terms general and particular considerations respecting the origin of the animated tribes. He regards it as a thing completely demonstrated, or as requiring so little proof as to be taken for granted, that the inorganic elements all took together by a process of natural law, which Deity was not required to superintend, but simply to begin. He supposes, hypothetically, that this also would be the case with the organic structures, that, in the originating of the first tribes, God supplied the materials, and that natural law assimilated and fashioned them into their different orders and families. This might be predicated of the Creator, he fancies, as the mode in which he _would_ act; and by removing him a step away from his own works, and allowing all the subsequent genera and species of the epochs of geology to go out and to come in according to the same process, his special interference in such arrangements is rendered unnecessary; and the greater honor is reflected upon operations in themselves so complicated and vast, and yet all so minutely, orderly, and prospectively ordained.