EVOLUTION AND THE DOCTRINE OF DESIGN. 99 



yet the precise form of the human body must have been influenced by 

 an infinite train of circumstances aflecting the reproduction, growth, 

 and health, of the whole chain of intermediate beings. No doubt, the 

 circumstances being what they were, man could not be otherwise than 

 he is ; and, if, in any other part of the universe an exactly similar earth, 

 furnished with exactly similar germs of life, existed, a race must have 

 grown up there exactly similar to the human race. 



By a different distribution of atoms in the primeval world, a dif- 

 ferent series of living forms on this earth must have been produced. 

 From the same causes acting according to the same laws, the same 

 results will follow ; but from different causes acting according to the 

 same laws, different results will follow. So far as we can see, then, 

 infinitely diverse living creatures might have been created consistently 

 with the theory of evolution, and the precise reason why we have a 

 backbone, two hands with opposable thumbs, an erect stature, a 

 complex brain, two hundred and twenty-three bones, and many other 

 peculiarities, is only to be found in the original act of creation. I do 

 not, any less than Paley, believe that the eye of man manifests design. 

 I believe that the eye was gradually developed ; and we can, in fact, 

 trace its gradual development from the first germ of a nerve affected 

 by light-rays in some simj^le zoophyte. In proportion as the eye be- 

 came a more delicate and accurate instrument of vision, it enabled its 

 possessor to escape destruction; but the ultimate result must have 

 been contained in the aggregate of the causes, and these causes, so far 

 as we can see, were subject to the arbitrary choice of the Creator. 



Although Pro£ Agassiz is clearly wrong in holding that every 

 species of animals or plants has appeared on earth by the immediate 

 intervention of the Creator, which would amount to saying that no 

 laws of connection between forms are discoverable, yet he seems to 

 be right in asserting that living forms are entirely distinct from those 

 produced from purely physical causes. " The products of what are 

 commonly called physical agents," he says,^ "are everywhere the 

 same (i. e.,upon the whole surface of the earth), and have always been 

 the same (i. e., during all geological periods) ; while organized beings 

 are everywhere different and have differed in all ages. Between two 

 such series of phenomena there can be no causal or genetic connec- 

 tion." Living forms, as we now regard them, are essentially variable. 

 Now, from constant mechanical causes, constant effects would ensue. 

 If vegetable cells are formed on geometrical principles, being first 

 spherical, and then by mutual compression dodecahedral, then all cells 

 should have similar forms. In the Foraminifera and some other of 

 the more lowly organisms, we do seem to observe the production of 

 complex forms on pure geometrical principles. But from similar 

 causes, acting according to similar laws and principles, only similar re- 

 sults could be produced. If the original life-germ of each creature is a 

 ^ Agassiz's " Essay on Classification," p. 75. 



