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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: form?was the attempt to prove that heat, light, electricity, magnetism, and even mechanical power, are variations or transmutations of one force, atheistical in its tendency ? The supposed establishment of this view is reckoned as one of the greatest scientific triumphs of this century. Perhaps, however, the objection is brought, not so much against the speculation itself, as against the attempt to show how derivation might have been brought about. Then the same objection applies to a recent ingenious hypothesis made to account for the genesis of the chemical elements out of the ethereal medium, and to explain their several atomic weights and some other characteristics by their successive complexity?hydrogen consisting of so many atoms of ethereal substance united in a particular order, and so on. The speculation interested the philosophers of the British Association, and was thought innocent, but unsupported by facts. Surely Mr. Darwin's theory is none the worse, morally, for having some foundation in fact. In our opinion, then, it is far easier to vindicate a theistic character for the derivative theory, than to establish the theory itself upon adequate scientific evidence. Perhaps scarcely any philosophical objection can be urged against the former to which the nebular hypothesis is not equally exposed. Yet the nebular hypothesis finds general scientific acceptance, and is adopted as the basis of an extended and recondite illustration in Mr. Agassiz's great work.1 How the author of this book harmonizes his scientific theory with his philosophy and theology, he hasnot informed us. Paley in his celebrated analogy with the watch, insists that if the timepiece were so constructed as to produce other similar watches, after a manner of generation in animals, the argument fro...