and the Cannon Ball, and are at Fort Rice, from whence we send you our sketches by the steamer Silver Lake, which bears. us company to the Fort, loaded with Government stores; she returns immediately to St. Louis. We are now eighteen hundred and forty six miles above St. Louis.

Thus far we have seen but little game. The buffalo have gone back to the hills, and will remain there until the little streams dry up, when they will return to the Missouri. A few only have been seen, and no Indians, as they are upon the trail of the buffalo. But few birds inhabit this region, of any kind. Large bands of antelope are constantly seen, but bound away at our approach. The only song of the feathered tribe that has greeted our ears in this far-off land has been the plaintive notes of the whip-poor-will, whose homelike song is ever loved, in every land. Its familiar voice awakens a thousand pleasing memories. It comes near to us as it did in the days of our childhood, at the old ancestral cottage in New England, as if to remind us of the sweet days of our youth, of associations long since departed, and memories saddened by the rude hand of time.

So far are we now from the Mississippi, and yet thirteen hundred and twenty nine miles from Fort Benton, our destination, and the head of navigation on the Missouri. When we have gone farther and seen more, we may have more to say.

ARTICLE III.

RELIGION AND CHEMISTRY.

BY PROF. J. B. SEWALL, BOWDOIN COLLEGE, BRUNSWICK, ME.

Religion and Chemistry; or, Proofs of God's Plan in the Atmosphere and its Elements. Ten Lectures delivered at the Brooklyn Institute, Brooklyn, N. Y., on the Graham Foundation. By JOSIAH P. COOKE, Jr., Erving Professor of Chemistry and Mineralogy in Harvard University. New York: Charles Scribner. 1864.

THIS course of lectures, first delivered before the Brooklyn Institute in January and February, 1861, was repeated the same winter before the Lowell Institute, Boston, nad the Me

chanics' Association, Lowell. The volume is printed sumptuously on tinted and laid paper at the University Press, Cambridge, and is a luxury in the way of mechanical execution. We rejoice in the new era in book making which has dawned upon us in these later days. Our eyes rejoice. No more painful pages, we would gladly believe, of fine type and blurred printing. A lasting farewell to the volumes in which, for economy's sake, the long treatises of the fathers in Science, Philosophy and Theology, the latter especially, have been packed in fine print upon thin paper. Poor economy it was. As for ourselves, we long ago swore our Quaker oath that we would have nothing more to do with them, and have kept it.

The object of these lectures is indicated by the fact that they were delivered to the Brooklyn Institute on the Graham foundation, as well as in the title, "Or Proofs of God's Plan in the Atmosphere and its Elements." It is also thus stated in the first lecture; "It will be my object, in the present course of lectures, to aid in carrying out the noble purposes of the founder by developing before you the illustrations of the wisdom, goodness and power of God, which have been discovered in the constitution of matter." This work the author has accomplished in a most interesting and highly satisfactory manner, making a volume which is a very valuable contribution to natural theology.

The first Lecture consists of a statement of the case," by way of introduction, and "Testimony of the Atmosphere in part." In the statement of the case, Professor Cooke sets forth the truth, that though physical science has in time past, through the elation of success while yet in the period of its youth, been somewhat proud and arrogant, and usurped the authority which was not its due, it must yet be and prove itself in harmony with faith and a handmaid of religion, and that the church certainly can have no reason for alarm from its investigations and accomplishments. And we may add that no good man ought to feel alarm at any of the pretensions of science. For, as we have always seen that that which was not properly founded in truth has come to the ground in time past, so we may be sure it will be in time to come. No falsehood can live. No edifice of untruth, however sustained in appearance by

science, can long stand. It is only truth which abides the test of time. Meanwhile, "fret not thyself because of evil doers." He also lays down the principle correctly and with discrimination, that while natural theology is no substitute for a faith based on a supernatural revelation, it is yet the logical basis of such a faith. It is the necessary basis of Christianity. The Christian revelation does not prove the existence of God. It assumes it. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." That revelation is based on a belief in God's being which already exists in the mind of man.*

While, however, the Bible never undertakes the proof of the being of God, it points to the sources of that proof; and in so doing evidently would have men study the testimonies, and bring them forth from the storehouses of nature and the universe. "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork." If the heavens declare the glory of God, then their testimony is to be considered. Men are to look through science for that proof of the being and attributes of God which revelation assumes. For the best of reasons, then, the church should entertain no fear nor jealousy of science. At the hands of finite men, and men sometimes of unsanctified and irreverent minds, it is no wonder that it has given forth an uncertain sound. But ultimately it must sound with strong tone harmonious with revelation.

In the Testimony of the Atmosphere, commenced in the first and continued through the second lecture, Professor Cooke begins the presentation of the argument of special adaptations, which he continues by illustrations from the facts, and later discoveries especially, of Chemistry, through seven lectures.

The argument from special adaptations is that which lies at the basis of all works on natural theology, and is the same with that condensed by Dugald Stewart into the two propositions, that "Everything which begins to exist must have a cause," and "a combination of means conspiring to a particular end, implies intelligence"; including the truth put into these

We should prefer to say not based upon a belief already existing; but, addressed to mind prepared by constitution to accept and maintain the idea as a truth when suggested. The Bible can go upon this truth unproved; because the human mind is so constituted by its author that it can not but accept the idea of God as a truth.

propositions by Reid: "Design may be traced from its effects; and, "there are evidences of design in the universe." What is the force of this argument? This: Suppose on some morning walk you find yourself upon the wharf. A ship is freighting with an assorted cargo for some distant port, and on the wharf are many varieties of manufacture, and articles for different use and convenience. There are different articles manufactured of iron. Side by side are heavy anchors with their monstrous flukes designed to hold ships safely at rest in storm and in calm; and carpenters' tools, fitted with keen edge to hew and plane, make smooth surfaces and nice joints; and cooking stoves, with their various culinary utensils; and sewing machines, with their simple yet wonderful contrivances of needle, cogwheel and shuttle. Here is this common and homely, but most useful of all metals, in these various forms adapted to different purposes. What do you say of these different adaptations? That it required not only mechanical power and skill to make them; but intelligent mind, and more or less of benevolent or selfish motive to contrive and shape them for their different ends. The shaping of the anchor to take hold with its strong flukes at the bottom of the sea, and the ponderous machinery which molded and forged it, required intelligent mind. There was an end foreseen, a result to accomplish. So with the carpenters' tools, the stove and its utensils, and the sewing machine. The material is one; but in its different shapes it is adapted to different uses. Mind could only foresee those uses, and govern in shaping the metal differently in view of them. So if one were to enter a machine shop, and see on the one hand iron wrought into the form of a locomotive, and on the other into the form of a stationary engine. It is mind only, intelligence, will, and more or less of benevolent or selfish purpose, which determines the different forms which the metal takes, and that according to a final cause.

So with the atmosphere or water or metals, anything which exists in nature with a use and for an end. We know in the previous cases that mind has presided as the originating and producing power for the sake of the end; we are convinced that it must be so in the latter. It is an argument of analogy, but the very strongest of arguments for all that. Considering

a tree with its fruits, or the soil with its different qualities, or any gas with its peculiar characteristics and end which it fulfils, a man would no more be able to admit that either existed by chance and without any originating intelligence and will, than that the locomotive, thundering by on the railway with its ponderous train of cars, or the sewing machine, put in motion by the sewing woman's foot, and doing the work of many fingers at once, was a growth and an existence of mere accident, independent of any power of reason and will. It is as strong an argument as is possible. It is different in kind, indeed, from the so-called demonstrative of mathematics; different, from the nature of the case; but we affirm that it is equally valid and valuable. Professor Cooke at the commencement of his eighth lecture, remarks:

"We have read together one brief chapter of that evidence of design with which the book of nature is filled, and I can not but trust that we have gained from our study nobler conceptions and more enlarged views of the wisdom, power, and goodness of our Heavenly Father. Every one who accepts the Bible as a divine revelation will rejoice to find how beautifully and how entirely the facts of science confirm its great fundamental truths. But have not these evidences of nature a greater value even than this? Do they not prove, independently of all revelation, the existence of a wise and omnipotent first cause, at least so far as there is any moral certainty in the world? I am persuaded that they do, and I believe that they furnish the only logical ground on which a system of revealed religion can be based."

We agree with him. We believe that they do prove the existence of a wise and omnipotent First Cause. There are different kinds and degrees of argument; but what is proved by one is as much proved as that which is proved by another. It is as great misfortune that demonstrative reasoning, which belongs strictly to the domain of pure mathematics, should be exalted into a place of preference and respect as a kind of reasoning as being of a better and more certain sort than any other as it is foolish for any one to ask for its methods where only other methods can be employed, and to refuse conviction and belief because its methods can not be employed. A man has just as good ground for belief in his senses when he feels