244 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



preserve their species, to escape their enemies, to remove discomforts. 

 All nature, thus examined, and particularly all animated nature, seems 

 full of means toward ends, and those ends invariably such as a be- 

 neficent Creator might well be supposed to have in view. And while 

 there is undeniably one great objection to his whole argument, namely, 

 that the Creator is represented as an artificer rather than a Creator, as 

 overcoming diflSculties which stood in his way rather than as an Al- 

 mighty Being fashioning things according to his will, yet the argu- 

 ment thus drawn from evidence of design remains exceedingly power- 

 ful, and it has always been considered a strong corroboration of the 

 voice within which bids us believe in a God. Now, it certainly seems 

 at first as if this argument were altogether destroyed. If animals were 

 not made as we see them, but evolved by natural law, still more if it 

 appear that their wonderful adaptation to their surroundings is due to 

 the influence of those surroundings, it might seem as if we could no 

 longer speak of design as exhibited in their various organs ; the organs, 

 we might say, grow of themselves, some suitable and some unsuitable 

 to the life of the creatures to which they belonged, and the unsuitable 

 have perished and the suitable have survived. 



But Paley has supplied the clew to the answer. In his well-known 

 illustration of the watch picked up on the heath by the passing trav- 

 eler, he points out that the evidence of design is certainly not lessened 

 if it be found that the watch was so constructed that, in course of 

 time, it produced another watch like itself. He was thinking not of 

 evolution, but of the ordinary production of each generation of ani- 

 mals from the preceding. But his answer can be pushed a step fur- 

 ther, and we may with equal justice remark that we should certainly 

 not believe it a proof that the watch had come into existence without 

 design if we found that it produced in course of time not merely an- 

 other watch but a better. It would become more marvelous than ever 

 if we found provision thus made, not merely for the continuance of the 

 species, but for the perpetual improvement of the species. It is essen- 

 tial to animal life that the animal should be adapted to its circumstances ; 

 if, besides provision for such adaptation in each generation, we find 

 provision for still better adaptation in future generations, how can it be 

 said that the evidences of design are diminished ? Or take any sepa- 

 rate organ, such as the eye. It is impossible not to believe, until it be 

 disproved, that the eye was intended to see with. We can not say that 

 light was made for the eye, because light subserves many other pur- 

 poses besides that of enabling eyes to see. But that the eye was in- 

 tended for light there is so strong a presumption that it can not easily 

 be rebutted. If, indeed, it could be shown that eyes fulfilled several 

 other functions, or that species of animals which always lived in the 

 dark still had fully-formed eyes, then we might say that the connec- 

 tion between the eye of an animal and the light of heaven was acci- 

 dental. But the contrary is notoriously the case — so much the case 



