But, if the reasoning here is bad, the philosophy is still worse. It is not philosophy at all to speak of anything in nature as _unshapen_. Matter is never presented to us in its simple elements. What we see of the visible, material world, is something in combination with something else, substance united with substance, and the union and combination are not accidental or chancework. There are law, order, and definite proportion in every compound body. Things go together by determinate arrangement. When first summoned into being, the elements of the universe had each separately their own communicated properties; they took their places in the mass, each according to their natures; and now the little and the great, the bowlder on the heath and the orbs on high, the concrete rock and our whole planetary system, are modeled upon a plan, and all subservient to a purpose. In decomposition none of them waste or decay. Resolved into their primary atoms, they unite in new arrangements, and collect into new bodies; and in the putrid corrupting mass, the law of order, symmetry, and beauty, reigns in active operation, eliminating new structures and establishing new harmonies. Men have long been acquainted with the fact, that in all combinations of two or more substances, there are certain proportions which obtain among the different ingredients, and that the best mixtures are those which are regulated according to a scale. The arts have flourished, and improved in one age above those in another, just in proportion as this principle has been attended to, and the degree in which the properties of compounds have been ascertained. We hence learn to imitate the crystal in its clearness, and to rival the colors of gems and flowers. The metals are thus tempered for the use and benefit of society. The acids are neutralized, and salts are formed, and the health of man is restored or preserved. Dalton discovered the law of combination in definite and multiple proportions to be constant in the thin air we breathe—that water, in all conditions and situations, consists of the two ingredients oxygen and hydrogen, and that these in weight are always as eight of the former to one of the latter—that even the most elastic gases are composed of particles of real, ponderable, definable matter—and that through all substances, palpable or impalpable, gross or ethereal, the principle of aggregation, according to the atomic theory, is universal. Science has not, indeed, as yet determined what is the law of connection between the chemical composition and the crystalline forms of bodies; although Sir David Brewster has clearly established that there is an exact correspondence between their optical properties and their crystalline forms,—the law of the transmission of light through specific substances. Sir Isaac Newton had long before cone to the conclusion—and from the heavens brought down a philosophy to explain the theory of the