108 ON THE LATEST FORM OF THE DEVELOPMENT THEORY. 
gians have for declaring that the animal and vegetable kingdoms — i. e. God's works 
— show purpose and intention just as clearly as man's works do. No direct proof is 
possible in either case. The only argument is from analogy and an appeal to common 
sense. The sceptic may defy Mr. Darwin to prove directly, that the Silurian fossils did 
not exist primarily, ab origine, in the rock where:we now find them, — composed of 
stone, as they now are. For, take the doctrine of Democritus and Epicurus, which, 
as already intimated, is the progenitor of this Development Theory. If the mere 
fortuitous concourse of atoms, in the lapse of a past eternity, can have formed a living 
tree, fish, or elephant, then, we say, that same rudderless and purposeless crowd of 
primeval atoms, in the lapse of a past eternity, can have formed, what is much easier, 
a fossil tree, fish, or elephant, as fossils. 
Yet Mr. Darwin assumes the previous existence of dë fossils in a living state, as 
a means of building up a theory which shall enable him to assert that “a structure 
even as perfect as the eye of an eagle might be formed by natural selection yes that 
is, without any special design or intention to create an organ of vision. He admits 
that “it is scarcely possible to avoid comparing the eye to a telescope. We know that 
this instrument has been perfected by the long-continued efforts of the highest human 
intellects ; and we naturally infer that the eye has been formed by a somewhat analo- 
gous process.” But he asks, “May not this inference be presumptuous? Have we 
any right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man?” 
(p. 169.) But this is not the question. There is just as much “ presumption” 
in assuming to determine that the Creator ought mot to work in a given manner, or 
through certain *intellectual powers," as in taking it for granted that he would or 
must employ such means. In either case, this is assuming to set bounds to Omnipo- 
tence, and to prescribe how Infinite Wisdom ought, or ought not, to act. Our only 
business, as students of natural science, is to follow the evidence wherever it may lead 
us, and to be consistent in the inferences which we draw from it, leaving it to philoso- 
phers and theologians to reconcile, if they can, our conclusions with their preconceived 
ideas of what is becoming to the Creator. If they cannot reconcile them, so much the 
worse for their preconceived ideas. Our only question is, Whether it is consistent to 
infer, from a general analogy of structure with living forms at the present day, that 
certain fossilized skeletons were living organisms millions of years ago, though we 
confidently deny, in spite of the far more striking analogy between an eagle's eye and 
a telescope, that an intelligence presided over the formation of the one similar to that 
which we know to have concurred in the production of the other? Can we justly 
infer life from a general analogy of structure, while we refuse to infer intelligence from 
