DARWIN VS. GALIANI. 411 



•with honest dice. Any man in his senses might have known beforehand 

 that the dice were cogged, and the fellows who found this out only after 

 their money was gone were laughed at heartily. But the point of the 

 story is this : If two dice fall on the same side four times in succession, 

 you, not being lazzaroni, hold it to be impossible that the thing should 

 happen by accident. You conclude, with undoubting certitude, that a 

 hidden cause, designed to produce this effect, has been incorporated in 

 the dice, in the shape of a little lead. But, when you see all around 

 you this universe, with its innumerable suns, planets, and moons, which, 

 poised in vacancy, have for thousands of years been rhythmically travel- 

 ing in their courses, without ever a collision ; when you see on this 

 globe dry land, sea and atmosphere, sunshine and rain, so distributed that 

 myriads of plants and of terrestrial, aquatic, and aerial animals swarm 

 in joyous life ; when, for all these creatures, you see the alternation of 

 day and night, of winter and summer, beneficently answering, in all re- 

 spects, to the requirements of activity and rest, cessation and growth ; 

 when, in your own body, you see each particle of its ineffably compli- 

 cated structure performing exactly the functions which the good of the 

 whole organism demands, while in turn it can itself subsist only in the 

 whole ; when, in your own members, your eye, your ear, you see the 

 profoundest science of the mechanician or the optician so far transcend- 

 ed that our friend D'Alembert and the great Euler yonder in St. Pe- 

 tersburg, e tutti quanti, appear as fools ; when you see this machine — 

 alongside of which your Le Roy's finest watch is, as it were, some coarse 

 piece of mill-gearing, your Vaucanson's most ingenious automaton a 

 wretched toy — perfecting itself by practice, making its own repairs ; 

 when you see it even reproduce its own kind, and male and female most 

 charmingly, mother and child most beautifully adapted to each other ; 

 when, in the Jardin du Roi, under a thousand animal forms, from the 

 elephant to the shrew-mouse, M. de Buffon shows you as many types of 

 your own organization, each one adapted in its own way for the enjoy- 

 ment of life and the pursuit of its prey, for defense against its foesf 

 for propagation of its kind, and for care of its young; when jmu see the 

 bees solving their cell-problem as correctly as the most learned of 

 mathematicians, the spiders bracing their polygons of silken threads, 

 the mole excavating its galleries, the beaver constructing its dams ; 

 when, further, in all these instances you see the agreeable combined 

 with the useful, and magnificence, ornament, and grace everywhere 

 lavishly displayed— Flora's children clothed with beauty, the gaudy 

 butterfly flitting about among them, the peacock spreading his tail- 

 feathers ; finally, when Mr. Needham shows you, under his microscope, 

 how each drop of vinegar or of paste is alive with creatures as numerous 

 as the worlds you have been able to descry through M. de Cassini's 

 telescope — you confidently say that all this is chance. And yet the 

 spectacle presented to us by nature is the same as though some one 

 were every instant, with an infinite number of dice, to make exactly the 



