DESIGN. 237 



being like the woodpecker may thus become adapted to 

 a score of contingencies." That italicised thus must be 

 understood to concern the explanations to his children 

 and to Asa Gray in regard to adaptation and design. 

 These explanations amount to this : 



Accidental change in an organism develops a new 

 relation to nature, and the realisation of the relation 

 gives the appearance of design. But from first to last in 

 the process really design there is none. We have 

 here, all through, in an organic reference, what we have 

 everywhere else in an inorganic results of natural law, 

 simply and alone. As, supernatural interference, there is 

 none required ; so, supernatural interference, there is none 

 bestowed. The most remarkable adaptations for special 

 purposes that can be seen in nature are perhaps those 

 between flowers and the insects which fertilise them ; 

 but there is not one single special adaptation even there 

 that is not the natural result of natural selection. There 

 is, in a certain way, design of course, glaring design, 

 but the whole of it is only ex post facto. Change of 

 species is due to no mechanism whatever but the develop- 

 ment of a new relation between nature and an individual 

 organism, in consequence of one or more of those varia- 

 tions of chance and accident which are unaccountably 

 always taking place, spontaneously as it were, in every 

 living tissue, let it be existent anywhere. That rela- 

 tion, dependent on natural change completely accidental, 

 may be distinctively named the Darwinian Relation. 

 The seizing of a new place was the form in which 

 what we name Relation, this new relation, occurred to 

 Mr. Darwin; and this new relation being the simple 

 consequent, was ex post facto design. The new relation, 

 though quite an agreement of accident, really consisted 

 of two terms in mutual rapport. Now it was rapport 

 that alone suggested design that alone was design : and 



