STATEMENT OF THE QUESTION AT ISSUE. 7 



thing serves a purpose when it is adapted for some end ; 

 thus a corkscrew is adapted to the end of extracting 

 corks from bottles, and our lungs are adapted to the end 

 of respiration. We may say that the extraction of 

 corks is the purpose of the corkscrew, and that respi- 

 ration is the purpose of the lungs, but here we shall 

 have used the word in two different senses. A man 

 made the corkscrew with a purpose in his mind, and he 

 knew and intended that it should be used for pulling 

 out corks. But nobody made our lungs with a purpose 

 in his mind and intended that they should be used for 

 breathing. The respiratory apparatus was adapted to 

 its purpose by natural selection, namely, by the gradual 

 preservation of better and better adaptations, and by the 

 killing-off of the worse and imperfect adaptations." * 



No denial of anything like design could be more 

 explicit. For Professor Clifford is well aware that the 

 very essence of the " Natural Selection " theory, is that 

 the variations shall have been mainly accidental and 

 without design of any sort, but that the adaptations of 

 structure to need shall have come about by the accu- 

 mulation, through natural selection, of any variation 

 that happened to be favourable. 



It will be my business on a later page not only to 

 show that the lungs are as purposive as the corkscrew, 

 but furthermore that if drawing corks had been a matter 

 of as much importance to us as breathing is, the list of 

 our organs would have been found to comprise one 

 corkscrew at the least, and possibly two, twenty, or ten 

 thousand ; even as we see that the trowel without which 



* ' Fortnightly Review,' new series, vol. xviii. p. 795. 



