LAWS OF NATURE

Auckland Star, Volume II, Issue 403, 26 April 1871, Page 2

LAWS OF NATURE

Three are certain philosophers who are ever talking of the laws of Nature, as if they could accomplish all that we see in the earth and heavens without the necessity of calling in any divine skill to arrange them. We have sometimes thought that it might be an appropriate punishment to deal with such persona as Jupiter did with those who complained to him of the way in which he regulated the weather. We would give the philosophers referred to a world of their own, with all the substances of nature, and their properties labelled upon them, and arranged according to human science, much like the articles in a museum or an apothecary's shop. We would place the mineralogist over the metals, the anatomist over the animals, the botanist over the vegetable substances ; we would give the meteorologist charge of the atmosphere and rain, and we would furnish the astronomer with those nebula? out of -which it is supposed that stars are formed, as webs are fashioned out of fleeces of wool. Having called theso philosophers together in Cabinet Council, we would there commit them theso principia of worlds. Taking cure to retire to a respectful distance for safety, it might be curious to listen to their disputes with one another ; aud then, when they had arranged their plans of operation, to find the chemist blown up by his own gases, the mineralogist sinking in the excavations which he had made, the anatomist groaning under disease, the botanist pining for hunger, the weather-regulator deluged with his own rain, and the astronomer driven ten thousand leaguoj into space by the reealcitration of some refractory planet. We may be sure that these philosophers would be the first to beg of Him who is the Disposer as well as the Creator of all things to resume the government of His own world. j M. Cash.