43 OP PLANTS AND ANIMALS. his performance and his skill. On the other hand, how glorious and divine an artificer would he be called, that should have made two of these pieces of clock-work above five thousand .years ago, and contrived such hidden springs amid motions within them, that they should have joined together, to perpetuate the species, and thus continue the same sort of clocks in more. than a hundred suc- cessions down to this day ? Though each of their springs might fail in forty years time, and their motions cease, or their materials deëay, yet that by the means of these two original engines, there should be engines of the same kind Multiplied upon the face ofthe earth, by the same rules of motion which the artist had establish- ed in the daywhen he first formed them. Such is the workmanship of God ; for nature is nothingbut his art. Such is the amazing penetration Of divine skill, such the long reachof his foresight, who has lung ago set his instruments at work, and guarded against all their possible deficiencies ; who has provided to replenish the world withplants and animals to the end of time, by the wondrous contrivance of his first creation, and the laws he then ordained. Thus every whale, eagle, and apple-tree, every lion and rose, fly and worm in our age, are is really the work of God, as the first which he made of the kind. It is so far from being a derogation to his honour, to perpetuate all the speciesby such in- . strutnents of his agency for many ages, that it rather aggrandizes the character of the Creator, and gives new lustre to divine wis- dom ; for if any thingcan be said to be easier or harder in this sort of almightywork, we may suppose it a more glorious diffi- culty for a God to employ asparrow or an oyster to make i spar- row or an oyster, than to make one immediately with his own hand, Perhaps there is not a wasp nor a butterfly now in the world, but has gone through almost six thousand ancestors, and .yet the work of the last parent is exquisitely perfect in shape, in colour, and in every perfection of beauty ; but it is all owing to the first cause. This is wisdom becoming a God, and demands fin 'eternal tribute of wonder and worship. APPENDIX. I KNOW some modern philosophers have supposed that the formation of plants and animals is beyond the reach and power of the laws of nature, and therefore they conceive that the Creator himself in the first individuals of every kind, actually formed and included all the future plants andanimals that should ever proceed from them complete in all their parts ; and these were contained in their distinct seeds, and perhaps decreasing in bulk successively in proportion almost infinitely less and less, as the seed is less than the plant or animal, and as each animal and plant in this miniature or minute form, is less than the sane plant
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