of which each element is composed, it has demonstrated the necessity for, and the proof of, the existence of a Maker.

THE ULTIMATE MOLECULES OF MATTER ARE MADE, manufactured, and bear the manufacturer's brand indeli bly stamped upon each one of them. Allow me to cite the words of one whose name will ensure respect from all scientists-Prof. James Clerk Maxwell, in his lecture before the British Association as given in the Scientific American, and cited in the Interior, Sept. 4, 1873:

"Professor Clerk Maxwell lately delivered an interesting lecture before the British Association upon Molecules, by which is meant the subdivision of matter into the greatest possible number of portions, similar to each other. Thus, if a number of molecules of water are combined, they form a mass of water. Molecules of some compound substances may be subdivided into their component substances. Thus the molecule of water separates into two molecules of hydrogen and one of oxygen.

"Professor Maxwell has calculated the size and weight of hydrogen molecules, and finds that about two millions of them, placed side by side in a row, would occupy a length of about one twenty-fifth of an inch, and that a package of them, containing a million million million million of them, would weigh sixty-two grains, or not quite one-eighth of an ounce.

"Each molecule throughout the universe, bears impressed on it the stamp of a metric system as distinctly as does the meter of the archives at Paris, or the double royal cubit of the Temple of Karnac.

"No theory of evolution can be formed to account for the similarity of molecules, for evolution necessarily implies continuous change, and the molecule is incapable of growth or decay, of generation or destruction. None of

the processes of nature, since the time when nature began, have produced the slightest difference in the properties of any molecule. We are therefore unable to ascribe either the existence of the molecules or the identity of their properties to the molecules, or the identity of their properties to the operation of any of the causes which we call natural. On the other hand, the exact equality of each molecule to all others of the same kind gives it, as Sir John Herschel has well said, the essential character of a manufactured article, and precludes the idea of its being eternal and self-existent.

"Thus we have been led, along a strictly scientific path, very near to the point at which science must stop. Not that science is debarred from studying the internal mechanism of a molecule which she can not take to pieces, any more than from investigating an organism which she cannot put together, but in tracing back the history of matter, science is arrested when she assures herself, on the one hand, that the molecule has been made, and on the other that it has not been made by any of the processes we call natural.

"Science is incompetent to reason upon the creation of matter itself out of nothing. We have reached the utmost limit of our thinking faculties when we have admitted that because matter cannot be eternal and self-existent, it must have been created. It is only when we contemplate, not matter in itself, but the form in which it actually exists, that our mind finds something on which it can lay hold. That matter, as such, should have certain fundamental properties, that it should exist in space and be capable of motion, that its motion should be persistent, and so on, are truths which may, for anything we know, be of the kind which metaphysicians call necessary. We may use our knowledge of such truth for purposes of deduction, but we have no data for speculating as to their

origin. But that there should be exactly so much matter and no more in every molecule of hydrogen, is a fact of a very different order. We have here a particular distribution of matter, a collocation, to use the expres sion of Dr. Chalmers, of things which we have no difficulty in imagining to have been arranged otherwise. The form and dimensions of the orbits of the planets, for instance, are not determined by any law of nature, but depend upon a particular collocation of matter. The same is the case with respect to the size of the earth, from which the standard of what is called the metrical system has been derived. But these astronomical and terrestrial magnitudes are far inferior in scientific importance to that most fundamental of all standards which forms the base of the molecular system. Natural causes, as we know, are at work, which tend to modify, if they do not at length destroy, all the arrangements and dimensions of the earth and the whole solar system. But though in the course of ages catastrophes have occurred, and may yet occur in the heavens; though ancient systems may be dissolved and new systems evolved out of their ruins; the molecules out of which these systems are built-the foundation stones of the material universe-remain unbroken and unworn. They continue this day as they were created, perfect in number, and measure, and weight, and from the ineffaceable characters impressed on them we may learn that those aspirations after accuracy in measurement, truth in statement, and justice in action, which we reckon among our noblest attributes as men, are ours because they are essentially constituents of the image of Him who in the beginning created, not only the heaven and the earth, but the materials of which heaven and earth consist."

The last word of science on this subject was spoken by Dr. Siemens in his Inaugural Address as President of the

British Association for the Advancement of Science, at its meeting in 1882, which, after an able review of the progress of the arts and sciences during the year, he concluded with a reverent doxology to the God who made this progress conduce to the welfare of mankind. He concludes:

"We shall thus find that in the great workshop of nature there are no laws of demarcation to be drawn between the most exalted speculation and commonplace practice, and that all knowledge must lead up to one great result that of an intelligent recognition of the Creator through his works. So then, we, members of the British Association, and fellow-workers in every branch of science, may exhort one another in the words of the American bard who has so lately departed from among us:

"Let us then be up and doing,

With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,

Learn to labor and to wait.'"

Thus true science contradicts the Nebular Hypothesis as unproven and incapable of proof; as contradicted by all the arrangements of our solar system; as contrary to the first principles of mechanics; as assuming an eternal homogeneous matter which has no existence in heaven or in earth; and as contrary to the fundamental constitution of the molecules of matter; in a word as an impossible dream.

The atheistic notion of an eternal, or self-creating world, is thus seen to be utterly unscientific and absurd. We fall back upon the sublime declaration of the Bible, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."