366 DARWINIANA. 



bility are drawn. . . . We cannot imagine ourselves in the 

 position of the Creator before his work began, nor examine 

 the materials among which he had to choose, nor count the 

 laws w r hich limited his operations. Here all is dark, and the 

 inference we draw from the seeming perfections of the exist- 

 ing instruments or means is a measure of nothing but our ig- 

 norance." 



But the question is not about the perfection of 

 these adaptations, or whether others might have been 

 instituted in their place. It is simply whether ob- 

 served adaptations of intricate sorts, admirably sub- 

 serving uses, do or do not legitimately suggest to one 

 designing mind that they are the product of some 

 other. If so, no amount of ignorance, or even incon- 

 ceivability, of the conditions and mode of production 

 could affect the validity of the inference, nor could it 

 be affected by any misunderstanding on our part as 

 to what the particular use or function was ; a state- 

 ment which would have been deemed superfluous, 

 except for the following : 



" There is not an organ in our bodies but what has passed, 

 and is still passing, through a series of different and often con- 

 tradictory interpretations. Our lungs, for instance, were an- 

 ciently conceived to be a kind of cooling apparatus, a refriger- 

 ator ; at the close of the last century they were supposed to 

 be a centre of combustion ; and nowadays both these theories 

 have been abandoned for a third. . . . Have these changes 

 modified in the slightest degree the supposed evidence of de- 

 sign ? " 



We have not the least idea why they should. So, 

 also, of complicated processes, such as human diges- 

 tion, being replaced by other and simpler ones in 

 lower animals, or even in certain plants. If " we 



