by their mutual collision; made to act chemically on one another by such increase or by subsequent decrease of temperature; perpetually approaching nearer to the forms into which, by the incessant action of the same forces, the present universe has grown; these elements, and the working of the several laws of their own proper nature, may be enough to account scientifically for all the phenomena that we observe.  We do not even then get back to regularity.  Why these elements, and no others; why in these precise quantities; why so distributed in space; why endowed with these properties:  still are questions which Science cannot answer, and there seems no reason to expect that any scientific answer will ever be possible.  Nay, I know not whether it may not be asserted that the impossibility of answering one at least among these questions is capable of demonstration.  For the whole system of things, as far as we know it, depends on the perpetual rotation of the heavenly bodies; and without original irregularity in the distribution of matter no motion of rotation could ever have spontaneously arisen.  And if this irregularity be thus original, Science can give no account of it.  Science, therefore, will have to begin with assuming certain facts for which it can never hope to account.  But it may begin by assuming that, speaking roughly, the universe was always very much what we see it now, and that composition and decomposition have always nearly balanced each other, and that there have been from the beginning the same sun and moon and planets and stars in the sky, the same animals on the earth and in the seas, the same vegetation, the same minerals; and that though there have been incessant changes, and possibly all these changes in one general direction, yet these changes have never amounted to what would furnish a scientific explanation of the forms which matter has assumed.  Or, on the other hand, Science may assert the possibility of going back to a far earlier condition of our material system; may assert that all the forms of matter have grown up under the action of laws and forces still at work; may take as the initial state of our universe one or many enormous clouds of gaseous matter, and endeavour to trace with more or less exactness how these gradually formed themselves into what we see.  Science has lately leaned to the latter alternative.  To a believer the alternative may be stated thus:  We all distinguish between the original creation of the material world and the history of it ever since.  And we have, nay all men have, been accustomed to assign to the original creation a great deal that Science is now disposed to assign to the history.  But the distinction between the original creation and the subsequent history would still remain, and for ever remain, although the portion assigned to the one may be less, and that assigned to the other larger, than was formerly supposed.  However far back Science may be able to push its beginning, there still must lie behind that beginning the original act of creation—­creation not of matter only, but of the various kinds of matter, and of the laws governing all and each of those kinds, and of the distribution of this matter in space.