matter very diverse in their properties. This deduction from the law which holds throughout the cosmos as now known to us, would have much weight even were it unsupported by induction; but a survey of chemical phenomena at large discloses several groups of inductive evidences supporting it.

The first is that since the cooling of the Earth reached an advanced stage, the components of its crust have been ever increasing in heterogeneity. When the so-called elements, originally existing in a dissociated state, united into oxides, acids, and other binary compounds, the total number of different substances was immensely augmented, the new substances were more complex than the old, and their properties were more varied. That is, the hiemblage became more heterogeneous in its kinds, in the composition of each kind, and in the range of chemical characters. When, at a later period, there arose salts and other compounds of similar degrees of complexity, there was again an increase of heterogeneity, alike in the aggregate and in its members. and when, still later, matters clhied as organic became possible, the multiformity was yet further augmented in kindred ways. If, then, chemical evolution, so far as we can trace it, has been from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, may we not fairly suppose that it has been so from the beginning? If, from late stages in the Earth???s history, we run back, and find the lines of chemical evolution continually converging, until they bring us to bodies which we cannot decompose, may we not suspect that, could we run back these lines still further, we should come to still decreasing heterogeneity in the number and nature of the substances, until we reached something like homogeneity?

A parallel argument may be derived from consideration of the affinities and stabilities of chemical compounds. Beginning with the complex nitrogenous bodies out of which living things are formed, andwhich, in the history of the Earth, are the most modern, atthe same time that they are the most heterogeneous, we see that the affinities and stabilities of these are extremely small. Their molecules do not enter bodily into union with those of other substances so as to form more complex compounds still, and their components often fail to hold together under ordinary conditions. A stage lower in degree of compositionwe come to the vast hiemblage of oxy-hydro-carbons, numbers of which show many and decidedaffinities, and are stable at common temperatures. phiing to the inorganic group, we are shown by the salts &c. strong affinities between their components and unions which are, in many cases, not very easily broken. And then when we come to the oxides, acids, and other binary compounds, we see that in many cases the elements of which they are formed, when brought into the presence of one another under favourable conditions, unite with violence; and that many of their unions cannot be dissolved by heat alone. If, then, as we go back from the most modern and most complex substances to the most ancient and simplest substances, we see, on the average, a great increase in affinity and stability, it results that if the same law holds with the simplest substances known to us, the components of these, if they are compound, may be hiumed to have united with affinities far more intense than any we have experience of, and to cling together with tenacities far exceeding the tenacities with which chemistry acquaints us. Hence the .