FINAL CAUSES. 31 



lymphatics, or of the heart have a different 

 object : and are they not the result of deliberate 

 and express contrivance in the great Mechanist 

 of the living frame ? 



The knowledge of the laws of electricity, in its 

 different forms, is one of the latest results which 

 science has revealed to man. Could these laws, 

 and their various combinations, have been un- 

 known to the Power who created the torpedo, 

 and who armed it with an energetic galvanic 

 battery, constructed upon the most refined scien- 

 tific principles, for the manifest purpose of 

 enabling the animal to strike terror into its 

 enemies, and paralyse their efforts to assail it. 



Does not the optician, who designedly places his 

 convex lens at the proper distance in a darkened 

 box, for the purpose of obtaining vivid pictures 

 of the external scene, evince his knowledge of 

 the laws of light, of the properties of refracting 

 media, and of the refined combinations of those 

 media by which each pencil is brought to a 

 separate focus, and adjusted to form an image of 

 remote objects? Does it not, in like manner, 

 argue the most profound knowledge and foresight 

 in the divine Artist, who has so admirably hung 

 the crystalline lens of the eye in the axis of a 

 spherical case, in the fore part of which He has 

 made a circular window for the light to enter, 

 and spread out on the opposite side a canvass to 

 receive the picture ? Has no thought been exer- 



