calculable and predicable in their consequences, as the statistics of
crime have incontestibly established.


GENERAL CONCLUSIONS ON THE VESTIGES.

The heavens are wonderful, and the earth is wonderful, and man, who, by
force of intellect, has sought to comprehend the immensity of one and
unravel the formation of the other, is hardly less wonderful than
either. Still the great mystery remains unriddled; our researches have
brought us no nearer the beginning, and the first cause of all continues
unapproachable and undefinable as ever. Instead of explaining physical
creation, we begin with it; we take the existence of matter for granted,
and its attributes for granted, and forthwith begin to fabricate a
universe, without first ascertaining whence was matter, or whence the
laws by which it is impressed, and has been governed in its evolutions.

Nature's greatest phenomena are the celestial spaces and the bodies that
fill them; our own planet and its living occupants. Upon each of these,
their commencement and subsequent vicissitudes, the _Vestiges of
Creation_ have propounded an hypothesis, but one mystery is only sought
to be explained by another still more mysterious. For the fiat of a
Creator chemical affinities and mechanical laws have been substituted,
but aided by these the author has failed to produce a world such as we
find it. Hence we are again driven upon the old tradition, the old
sacred authority, that the world was created out of nothing; and this is
as easy to comprehend as the solution of the _Vestiges_, that it sprang
from that which is certainly next to nothing--a heated fog or universal
fire-mist.