knowledge enabled us, reduced under the expression of
some general law; and that whatever changes are, or have been, produced in
the world, might be traced to the interwoven operations of such laws. But
however prevalent and justifiable such a presumption may be, we hold it no
sound philosophy to give it so complete a preponderance as to debar the
mind from contemplating the possibility of quite other and independent
acts of divine power, the possibility of the abrupt introduction into our
system of new facts, or series of facts, with their appropriate laws. The
author before us, in his anxiety to explain, after a scientific manner,
the introduction of life, and the various species of animals, into the
globe, seems to have thought himself entitled to have recourse to the
wildest hypothesis rather than to the immediate intervention of creative
power; as if it were something altogether unphilosophical to suppose that
there could be such a thing as a quite new development of that plastic
energy. It is not even necessary that we should urge, that if a Creator
exist, it is a most unwarrantable supposition to imagine that all his
creative power has been exhausted. We say, even to an atheistic
philosophy, that it is an unauthorized limitation that would forbid the
mind to contemplate the possibility of the uprise, in time, of entirely
new phenomena. Can any philosopher, of any school whatever, be justified
in saying, that there shall be no new fact introduced into the
universe?--that its laws cannot be added to? Why should he recoil from the
introduction of any thing new? If he is one whose last formula stands
thus, _whatever is, is_--this new fact will also fall, with others, into
his formula. Of this, also, he can say, _whatever is, is_. There is, we
repeat, a strong presumption in favour of a scientific sequence, of an
unbroken order of events; but this presumption is not to authorize any
hypothesis whatever in order to escape from the other alternative, an
immediate intervention of creative power. This, also, is a probability
which philosophy recognises, and in which a rational mind may choose to
rest till science brings to him some definite result.

We are very far from intending to follow the author of the _Vestiges of
the Natural History of the Creation_ through all the sciences along which
his track has led him. We shall limit ourselves to what forms the most
peculiar and startling portion of his work--to his theory of