The naturalist will answer "No," to the question I have set down to him. He will tell us that he can classify the various forms of animal and vegetable life, basing his classification upon certain similarities of structure or habits; but when it comes to accounting for the great variety and forms of life in animated nature; or to telling why it is that one seed produces the mighty, sturdy oak, and another the supple willow; or why each species of animals produces its kind--he cannot inform you. His most careful investigations and patient watching have failed to rob nature of these secrets. The chemist of a century ago, who thought he had reduced compound substances to their primary elements, and had discovered all the primary elements of substances; could he live today, he would see his "elements" separated and reduced, and a multitude of other elements unknown to him, brought within the compass of chemical science; and yet the existence of the universe itself, remaining as great a mystery as ever. Indeed, the wonder grows rather than diminishes with each succeeding discovery; for these things increase the mystery by revealing the complexity and delicate combinations of substances as they exist in their varied forms. To the physician, the surgeon, the scientist, the mystery of life remains as much an unsolved problem as it ever did. It is true they claim to have traced it down to its beginning; they say it originates in a substance known to them as protoplasm; that a single cell of this wonderful substance has the peculiar power of producing another cell, and this one still another. This multiplication of protoplasmic cells continuing until it develops in the varied processes of nature into the great variety of animal organisms known to us. Yet after all his work, the scientist at last, with nervous hand and throbbing brow reaches a point beyond which he cannot go, and the single cell of protoplasm, with the peculiar power to multiply itself, is as great a mystery as man with his complex organism of bones and nerves and muscles. To the question I have put to the astronomer, he would doubtless answer, with some impatience, that his best instruments but revealed to him the nearest outposts of the stellar worlds; and that beyond these few street lamps within his vision, with whose positions he has become acquainted and marked down on his chart, are numberless planetary systems out of the reach of his instruments, but whose existence is revealed by masses of light through which he cannot penetrate. His science is unsatisfied, the little he has learned but reveals to him the vastness and extent of those fields of knowledge beyond his power to enter, much less to reap.