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About The Book: The book lectures were originally presented at the Brooklyn Institute in 1861 and later given again at the Lowell Institute in Boston and before the Mechanics' Association of Lowell. The lectures were expanded from six to ten, incorporating many additions since their original delivery to account for the progress of science. The lectures aimed to demonstrate that there is ample evidence of design in the properties of the chemical elements alone and that organic development cannot undermine the foundation of the argument for Natural Theology. About The Author: Josiah Parsons Cooke (1827 – 1894) was an American scientist who worked at Harvard University and was instrumental in the measurement of atomic weights, inspiring America's first Nobel laureate in chemistry, Theodore Richards, to pursue similar research. Cooke's 1854 paper on atomic weights has been said to foreshadow the periodic law developed later by Mendeleev and others. Historian I. Bernard Cohen described Cooke "as the first university chemist to do truly distinguished work in the field of chemistry" in the United States. Cooke's first publication was in 1852, a study of an arsenic crystal. This was followed by investigations of the atomic weights of arsenic and other elements. In 1857 he published a collection of chemical problems for use of the undergraduates of Harvard College with reference to the Elements of Chemistry by Julius Adolph Stockhardt.