46 EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW. 



" The senses of animals appear to me quite incapable 

 of receiving the explanation of their origin which this 

 theory affords. Including under the word ' sense ' the 

 organ and the perception, we have no account of either. 

 How will our philosopher get at vision or make an eye ? 

 Or, suppose the eye formed, would the perception 

 follow ? The same of the other senses. And this ob- 

 jection holds its force, ascribe what you will to the hand 

 of time, to the power of habit, to changes too slow to 

 be observed by man, or brought within any comparison 

 which he is able to make of past things with the present. 

 Concede what you please to these arbitrary and unat- 

 tested superstitions, how will they help you ? Here is 

 no inception. No laws, no course, no powers of nature 

 which prevail at present, nor any analogous to these 

 would give commencement to a new sense ; and it is in 

 vain to inquire how that might proceed which would 

 never begin" 



In answer to this, let us suppose that some inhabitants 

 of another world were to see a modern philosopher so 

 using a microscope that they should believe it to be a 

 part of the philosopher's own person, which he could 

 cut off from and join again to himself at pleasure, and 

 suppose there were a controversy as to how this micro- 

 scope had originated, and that one party maintained the 

 man had made it little by little because he wanted it, 

 while the other declared this to be absurd and impos- 

 sible; I ask, would this latter party be justified in 

 arguing that microscopes could never have been per- 

 fected by degrees through the preservation of and accu- 

 mulation of small successive improvements, inasmuch 



