f one and
unravel the formation of the other, is hardly less wonderful than
either. Still the great mystery remains unriddled; our researches have
brought us no nearer the beginning, and the first cause of all continues
unapproachable and undefinable as ever. Instead of explaining physical
creation, we begin with it; we take the existence of matter for granted,
and its attributes for granted, and forthwith begin to fabricate a
universe, without first ascertaining whence was matter, or whence the
laws by which it is impressed, and has been governed in its evolutions.

Nature's greatest phenomena are the celestial spaces and the bodies that
fill them; our own planet and its living occupants. Upon each of these,
their commencement and subsequent vicissitudes, the _Vestiges of
Creation_ have propounded an hypothesis, but one mystery is only sought
to be explained by another still more mysterious. For the fiat of a
Creator chemical affinities and mechanical laws have been substituted,
but aided by these the author has failed to produce a world such as we
find it. Hence we are again driven upon the old tradition, the old
sacred authority, that the world was created out of nothing; and this is
as easy to comprehend as the solution of the _Vestiges_, that it sprang
from that which is certainly next to nothing--a heated fog or universal
fire-mist.

When the author deals with the facts of science he interests and
instructs, but when he speculates he only amuses or perplexes, without
advancing knowledge. His terse and luminous description of the astral
firmament deeply impresses with the might and the magnitude of the vast
design; but when he attempts to account for the elimination of suns and
worlds, their formation and arrangement, we are struck by the puerile
folly of his conjectural presumptions.

Descending from this august and glittering canopy to our own planet, we
are not less astonished by the exhibition of the extraordinary
revolutions it has undergone. Geology is the true historian of the
earth. Conducted by the lights it affords, we see an eternity of ages
has rolled before us; we discover a series of worlds rising through the
depths of ocean from the central sphere of heat, amidst boiling floods
and volcanic fires, each new platform of existence, that countless
periods of time had been requisite to form, peopled with its own
congenial forms of organic life, mostly commencing with the simpler, and
ascending by almos