on, otherwise than by creation, nor how the inertness and death into which this system must ultimately pass are to be escaped, otherwise than by a destructive and renovating action. As certainly as the present state of the world has been reached by definite stages, springing from fitting terms, so certainly can it not have transcended these terms by all eternity; as certainly as it is passing into new results, it cannot, by all eternity, leave those results behind it. As a growth --- an evolution --- the world, if no comparatively proximate starting point had been given it, must have passed away long ago, lost, as a mere speck of time in the past eternity. Nothing by mere stages of construction could reach down out of by-gone ages to the present hour.

An effort is made to turn nature, as represented in the solar system, into a circle, and to escape both a beginning and an end. The effort is vain. If, as has been suggested, the planets were ultimately to fall into the sun, the collision would not restore the primitive state, nor the full potentialities by which the work that has now been done could be repeated. Much the larger portion of the energy once contained in the solar system has been dispersed by the radiation of heat, and there is no known method by which this energy is to be gathered again, or even put to constructive service elsewhere.

Experience, then, can not affirm the eternity of matter and energy, much less affirm it in a form which would account for the creative work going on about us The conclusions of science lie in the opposite direction. The world wanes in power as