18 REVIEWS. 



propositions which are compared together. The weight of evidence is 

 thus made to tell, apparently, in favour of that proposition which will be 

 most readily and most generally understood. But if we examine these 

 two propositions abstractedly, the balance of proof, in reality, inclines the 

 other way ; since the special use which any organ does actually serve, as 

 part of a definite organism, constitutes but one Of the steps of that induc- 

 tive process by the help of which we have to trace it through the mani- 

 fold alterations of its accidental qualities, and consequent adaptation to 

 other uses, in order to arrive at the demonstration of a constant relation to 

 Final Cause subsisting in the indefinite variety of modifications of the 

 functions, as well as of the texture, bulk, and form of the parts. 



In the passage we have quoted last, all that is denoted by the term 

 " Homologue" is some coincidence in the use of the organs. We strongly 

 suspect that the authors have taken their definitions of the terms from one 

 source, and the propositions, in which the terms are involved, from some 

 other authority that has put a very different meaning upon them, without 

 themselves having detected the fallacy which they have thus been labouring 

 to construct. That the human eye and the whisker of a cat are homo- 

 logues is certainly not a Corollary from the definition of " Homologue" 

 given in page 25 — " the same organ in different animals under every 

 variety of form and function." The relation between the two, in this case, 

 seems to amount at the utmost to an Analogy, according to the definition 

 of an " Analogue," in the same page — " an organ in one animal having 

 the same function as a different organ in a different animal." But much 

 depends here upon the meaning of the word same, which appears to be 

 applied, sometimes, to things totally different. 



Indeed, throughout the whole work we have to complain of a want of 

 precision in the authors' reasoning. The design of the work is good, but 

 in the execution of it they appear as if resolved to bring into play every 

 particle of learning of which they were in possession, without much regard 

 to its bearing upon the general argument. Their professed object was to 

 prove and to illustrate the wisdom and intelligence of the Creator — first, by 

 useful effects being produced by means so well adapted and so complicated, 

 that they would not be attributed to chance on any of the acknowledged 

 principles that regulate human belief; secondly, by such instances of 

 order and method in the universe as may afford, by virtue of those same 

 principles, a degree of probability, amounting almost to moral certainty, in 

 favour of the supposition of Design. Now, under this second branch, it 

 is plain that every instance of apparent order and coincidence, which does 



