system would go into derangement-or, in other words, that the law, such as it is, was essential to the stability of the present mundane constitution. La Place would have accredited the law, the unconscious and unintelligent law, that thing according to him of blind necessity, with the whole of this noble and beautiful result overlooking what La Grange held to be indispensable as concurring elements in his demonstration of it-certain dispositions along with the law-such as the movement of all the planets, first in one direction, second nearly in one plane, and then in nearly circular orbits. We are aware, that according to the discoveries, or rather perhaps to the guesses of some later analysts, the three last circumstances might be dispensed with; and yet notwithstanding, the planetary system, its errors still remaining periodical, would in virtue of the single law oscillate around a mean estate that should be indestructible and everlasting. Should this come to be a conclusively settled doctrine in the science, it will extenuate, we admit, the argument for a designing cause in the formation of a planetarium. But it will not annihilate that argument for there do remain certain palpable utilities in the dispositions as well as laws of the planetary system, acknowledged by all the astronomers; such as the vastly superior weight and quantity of matter accumulated in its centre, and the local establishment there of that great fountain of light and heat from which the surrounding worlds receive throughout the whole of their course an equable dispensation. What a maladjustment would it have been, had the luminous

and the opaque matter changed places in the firmament; or the planets, by the eccentricity of their orbits, been subject to such vicissitudes of temperature as would certainly, in our own at least, have entailed destruction both on the animal and vegetable kingdoms.

12. We hold that there is strong evidence for the commencement of our planetary system— though we shall not attempt to expound it at present and the more, as there is a greatly overpassing evidence for the commencement of the organic systems in our animal and vegetable kingdoms, which are far more replete with the indications of design than is the mechanism of the heavens, as unfolded to us by astronomy. Let us therefore meanwhile assume a beginning for our solar system —and then, though we should not be able to disprove the eternity of matter, or that it had all the laws and properties which we now observe from everlasting still these laws and properties though perfectly sufficient to account for the working of the planetary mechanism, are not sufficient to account for the original collocation of its parts. They may account for the operation of the machine, but not for the fabrication of it. If we have evidence for its being at one time set up, we are in the profoundest ignorance of any law by which it behoved to be set up according to its present arrangement. Why, for example, should all the luminous matter have been accumulated in the centre? Why should the fountain-head of light and of heat have been throned, as it were, in that place, whence it could emanate its gracious influ

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ences with best advantage on those worlds, which by the weight of its superior attraction it could compel to a close attendance upon itself? Why, instead of this great central fire around which the planets move, and whence they receive through every part of their course an almost equable dispensation-might there not have been an opaque mass in the midst of that planetarium which now is lighted up so gorgeously; and wandering suns that, moving as comets do, might have scorched and left to freeze alternately the fixed and immoveable opaque in the midst of the firmament? And there are other adaptations-a rotation around every axis that affords a grateful succession of day and night—a progressive movement in space which along with the inclination of the axis to the plane of revolution leads on the seasons through the round of their beneficent journey-the satellites that reflect though they do not radiate, and cast their pale but useful lustre over the wintry and benighted regions of the worlds which they encompass the distance at which the planets are kept from each other, and the free uncumbered amplitude which is thus left for moving without interruption, and without even any hurtful disturbance from their mutual gravitations. These are the few but still the contingent simplicities which might or might not have taken place—and on the actual concurrence of which, those worlds resemble our own in certain great characteristics, which we know are indispensable to the sustenance and the being of all its animated generations. We are aware of no force now in operation that could have carried

out these planets to their respective distances from the sun-that could then, instead of simply leaving them to fall back into the mass of that great luminary, have projected them at about right angles to the line which lay between them-that could have directed the impulses so, as that in most instances, there should have been an axis with an angle of inclination to the plane of the orbit that should have so tempered the velocity of the centrifugal motion as to have given to each a nearly circular path-that, in like manner, should have launched the satellites around their primaries, and thus have given rise to that beauteous and beneficent mechanism which the laws of nature might keep in action, but which no laws of nature that we have any access to could have framed or put together. To constitute a machine is one thing-to continue it in operation is another. The latter might be done in virtue of the properties of matter, and the former not be referrible to any one material agent within the compass of our knowledge. Although we should concede to Atheists, that the laws of matter had been long antecedent to the formation of the planetary system-yet formed as the system may have been in accommodation to these laws, there might, by the mere adjustment of its parts, (and an adjustment which no blind and unconscious forces that we at least know of could have given rise to,) to subserve some striking and palpable ends there might be evidence in this goodly fabrication, of a purpose by an Artist's mind, and of an Artist's hand put forth on the execution of it.

13. But whatever defect or doubtfulness of evidence there may be in the mechanism of the heavens-this is amply made up for in a more accessible mechanism near at hand. If either the dispositions of matter in the former mechanism be so few, or the demonstrable results of its single law be so independent of them, that the agency of design rather than of necessity or chance be less manifest than it otherwise would be in the astronomical system; nothing on the other hand can exceed the force and concentration of that proof, which is crowded to so marvellous a degree of enhancement within the limits of the anatomical system. It is this which enables us to draw so much weightier an argument for a God, from the construction of an eye than from the construction of a planetarium. And here it is quite palpable, that it is in the dispositions of matter more than in the laws of matter, where the main strength of the argument lies, though we hear much more of the wisdom of Nature's laws than of the wisdom of her collocations.* Now it is true that the law of refraction is indispensable to the faculty of vision;

*This distinction between the laws and the collocations of matter is overlooked by atheistical writers, as in the following specimen from the " Systême de la Nature" of Mirabaud. "These prejudiced dreamers," speaking of believers in a God, "are in an ecstasy at the sight of the periodical motion of the planets; at the order of the stars; at the various productions of the earth; at the astonishing harmony in the component parts of animals. In that moment, however, they forget the laws of motion; the power of gravitation; the forces of attraction and repulsion; they assign all these striking phenomena to unknown causes, of which they have no one substantive idea."

When Professor Robison felt alarmed by the attempted demonstration of La Place, that the law of gravitation was an essential