the theory of a quiescent vitality, maintained by seeds for centuries within a few inches of the earth’s surface, we know not how a layer of shell, sand, or marl, spread over the bleak moors of Harris, should produce crops of white clover, where only heath had grown before; nor how brakes of doddered furze burnt down on the slopes of the Cromarty Sutors should be so frequently succeeded by thickets of raspberry. We are not, however to give up the _unknown_,—that illimitable province in which science discovers,—to be a wild region of dream, in which fantasy may invent. There are many dark places in the field of human knowledge which even the researches of ages may fail wholly to enlighten; but no one derives a right from that circumstance to people them with chimeras and phantoms. They belong to the philosophers of the future,—not to the visionaries of the present. But while it is not our part to explain _how_, in the experiments of Mr. Weekes, the chain of life from life has been maintained unbroken, we can most conclusively show, that that world of organized existence of which we ourselves form part, is, and ever has been, a world, not of tame repetition, but of endless variety. It is palpably not a world of _Acaridæ_ of one species, nor yet of creatures developed from these, under those electric or chemical laws of which the grand characteristic is invariability of result. The vast variety of its existences speak not of the operation of _unvarying laws_, that represent, in their uniformity of result, the unchangeableness of the Divinity, but of _creative acts_, that exemplify the infinity of His resources.