In pursuing these matters, your scientists will arrive at a number of important truths, entirely in opposition to some of your present apparently established theories. In your speculations touching the future state, there is a tendency which I cannot designate by any other name in your language than narrowness. You have come so recently to realize the immense sizes and distances of the heavenly bodies, that their comparison with your former constricted views in that direction has produced a sense of helplessness in the attempt to fathom these infinite spaces. But ages of contemplation will serve to broaden your views, as well as to expand your hopes. Encompassing or beside this broad universe we have evidence of a spiritual region, like the firm land bordering upon your own great ocean, which great body of water to the lower animal life within it is just as limitless and profound as the great cosmos is to yourselves. You have but recently discovered a process of nature, by whose slow changes, animal life has been altered, and its species modified and improved. You know that the atmosphere, which encircled your Earth at the beginning, was not of a composition to support its present highly organized respiring life, and that consequently, behind the ages the only living and moving things upon your planet were the scant air-consuming creatures, who inhabited the water. Among the dark and cavernous depths of your oceans, and the slimy ooze of your rivers and lakes, were located the cradles, where nature began moulding the present graceful living and moving forms which now roam over your solid surface. The Creator’s delicate laboratory, for the beginning of animal life, was placed among the equable temperatures, and soft walls of water below the variable and desiccating atmosphere, which everywhere surmounted it. Yourselves, as well as all other living and breathing creatures, had your foundations of life laid in the waters of the earth, a fact, of whose significant reminder is, that nature has continuously provided for the protective presence of water in your embryo womb growth.