The wandering Cainidae, or, The ancient nomads : a lecture delivered to the Medical Society of Dubois County, and to the citizens of Huntingburgh, Indiana, April 22, 1879 / by Matthew Kempf.

  • Kempf, Matthew.
Date:
1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The wandering Cainidae, or, The ancient nomads : a lecture delivered to the Medical Society of Dubois County, and to the citizens of Huntingburgh, Indiana, April 22, 1879 / by Matthew Kempf. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    And we, in our vorstellung, or mind-picturing, now behold the count- less brood of elements, like one vast sable atmospheric ocean, surround- ing the Heaven of heavens, as immovable as the statue of Niobe. But list! God says, let there be light; and there is light. And now behold how the primitive atoms, . . . “ primordial wholes Firmly draw or repel by their animate poles.” And now see, ®How from these elements’ proper synthesis All that exist evolve by slow degrees. This is the belief of the theist, the dualist, the Christian; and as you, Prof. Tyndall, so beautifully and poetically admire and illustrate when you are lecturing on the formation of crystals,! and when you in your vorstellung accompany the dew-atoms of the tropic seas to the Alpine glaciers, and state how by attraction and repulsion atom and molecule is drawn to, or repelled from, atom and molecule; not bois- terously and fortuitously, but silently and in accordance with laws more rigid than guide the best mechanical skill. But, yet, when you are standing under an umbrageous elm or in the conservatory of a friend, and see how the lignified elements of the earth are conveyed by the slender arteries (pores) of trees and shrubs of diverse growth, to form flowers as gaudy-colored as “ heaven’s ethereal bow ” when it spans the weeping skies after a spring-shower, and the nectareous fruit, fit food for gods, even you, esteemed sage, with all your profound lore of nature’s mysteries, acknowledge that you can not explain the whence and how of all of this, and humbly avow an omnipotent Designer and design; for you do not believe in spontaneous generation, ( JAnd that by a self-jumbling effort sprang The heavens and earth—the universe into being. Although you say, in your Belfast Address,|| “you see in matter the promise and potency of every form and quality of life;” yet I do not look on this sentence, as some of your polemic theistic opponents do, as rank materialism. I, too, see in elemental matter the power to assume the form of the moss on the sterile ridges of the Rocky Moun- tains, as well as the dome-like structure of the sequoia gigantea on * Wandering Cainid®, Book I. t Popular Science Monthly, August No., 1875. | Wandering Cainid®, Book I. || Popular Science Monthly, October No., 1875.