contains available for vegetable growth (such as potash, silicic acid, ammonia, &c.); the most unintermittent rain is unable to abstract from it (except by the mechanical action of floods) any of the chief requisites for its fertility. The particles of mould not only firmly retain all matter nutritive to vegetable growth, but also immediately absorb such as are contained in the rain-water (ammonia, potash, &c.). But only such substances are _completely_ absorbed from the water as are indispensable requisites for vegetable growth; others remain either entirely or for the most part in a state of solution." The laws and uses of light and heat, electricity and magnetism, and the adjustments which they presuppose, all point not less clearly to the ordinances of a supremely profound and accurate mind. In a word, out of a few elements endowed with definite powers, this world with its air and its seas, its hills and valleys, its vegetable forms and animal frames, and other worlds innumerable, have been built up by long-sustained and endlessly-varied processes of chemical synthesis mostly conducted under conditions so delicately adjusted to the requirements of each case, that the ablest chemists, with all their instruments and artifices, cannot even reproduce them on any scale however small. Can these elements be reasonably thought of as having been unfashioned and unprepared, or these processes as having been uninstituted and unpresided over by intelligence?[23] [23] See Appendix XV. The sciences of geology and palæontology disclose to us the history of our earth and of its vegetable and animal organisms. They prove that for countless ages, that from the inconceivably remote period of the deposition of the Laurentian rocks, light and heat, air and moisture, land and sea, and all general physical forces have been so arranged and co-ordinated as to produce and maintain a state of things which secured during all these countless ages life and health and pleasure for the countless millions of individuals contained in the multitude of species of creatures which have contemporaneously or successively peopled the earth. The sea, with its winds and waves, its streams and currents, its salts, its flora and fauna, teems with adaptations no less than the land. Probably no one has studied it with more care or to more purpose than Lieutenant Maury, and his well-known work on its physical geography proceeds throughout on the principle that "he who would understand its phenomena must cease to regard it as a waste of waters, and view it as the expression of One Thought, a unity with harmonies which One Intelligence, and One Intelligence alone, could utter;" while many of its pages might appropriately be read as a commentary on these lines of Wordsworth,-- "Huge ocean shows, within his yellow strand, A habitation marvellously planned, For life to occupy in love and rest."