As the highest mental powers and products of the most gifted of our race, were originally potential in the primitive ovum from which each took his origin, so, it is congruous, and capable of being grasped by our thought although it cannot be portrayed by our imagination, that the mind and will of the inscrutable Creator prevised and preordered the whole series of conditions which, by their immutable action, interaction, and rhythmic concurrence as ‘laws,’ evolved the universe. So far as the finest and keenest researches in chemistry and physics carry us, especially such researches as those of Crooks and Lockyer, it is powerfully indicated that the creative method in the inorganic world was a sublime progressive plan, a building up by law, of the dome of heaven and the floor of earth, and all that goes with both. But behind the matter and the motion, above the energies and the force, there surely was, as we have been constrained to see, what we can only think of as the conception, the purpose, and the will by which the evolving order, marked in high, and higher sublimity, the upward and onward movement of the ripening and uncounted ages. But when the highest point of the inorganic, the not-living, was reached, and a new factor had to appear in the world to crown some of its matter with _life_ and all its wonders, what was it that ensued? If ‘law’ did not cease to act; if there were no break in the continuity of evolution, and yet a factor of power, not now operating within the range of our knowledge, was absolutely necessary to change the not-living matter of the earth into matter that lived, how was it brought about? Our inability to reply, does not invalidate the facts on the one hand, nor justify attempts at explanations that find no sanction in experience and knowledge on the other. Suggestion by analogy, feeble as it is, is the nearest approach that we can make to the solution of what must, perhaps, remain for ever a splendid mystery. If creation be, then, the expression of the mind and will of a Creator, uttered in method and issuing in phenomena, he must see the end from the beginning: his resource is infinite. The human mathematician, of the highest order, can devise, with all the adaptations and prearrangements that are needed, an instrument or machine, which shall continue for a number of motions, without necessary limit, according to a primal law, but which by such prevised and preordered arrangements would, suddenly, at the required point of time, undergo change, and operate henceforth after a law entirely new.