82 DARWINIANA. 



curious appendages, and, a thousand times more won- 

 derful still, without being encumbered with a single 

 superfluous or useless part, can he say that this could 

 be the work of chance ? The improbability of this is 

 so great, and consequently the evidence of design is so 

 strong, that he is about to seal his verdict in favor of 

 design, when he opens Mr. Darwin's book. 



There he finds that an eye is no more than a vital 

 aggregation or growth, directed, not by design nor 

 chance, but moulded by natural variation and natural 

 selection, through which it must, necessarily, have been 

 developed and formed. Particles or atoms being ag- 

 gregated by the blind powers of life, must become 

 under the given conditions, by natural variation and 

 natural selection, eyes, without design, as certainly as 

 the red billiard-ball went to the west pocket, by the 

 powers of inertia and elasticity, without the design of 

 the hand that put it in motion. (See Darwin, p. 169.) 



Let us lay before our skeptic the way in which we 

 may suppose that Darwin would trace the operation 

 of life, or the vital force conforming to these laws. 

 In doing this we need not go through with the forma- 

 tion of the several membranes, humors, etc., but take 

 the crystalline lens as the most curious and nicely ar- 

 ranged and adapted of all the parts, and as giving, 

 moreover, a close parallel, in the end produced, to that 

 produced by design, by a human designer, Dollond, 

 in forming his achromatic object-glass. If it can be 

 shown that natural variation and natural selection 

 were capable of forming the crystalline lens, it will 

 not be denied that they were capable of forming the 

 iris, the sclerotica, the aqueous humors, or any and all 



