3l8 THE FOUNDATIONS OF ZOOLOGY 



Louis Agassiz, base their reasoning upon nature itself, rather than 

 upon evidence of contrivance in nature. 



Agassiz' s Essay on Classification, the last of the notable works 

 on natural theology, was published in 1857, ^s part of his "Contribu- 

 tions to the Natural History of the United States." 



The writer was a man of transcendent genius for scientific dis- 

 covery, with intense earnestness and enthusiasm for the pursuit of 

 truth, and rare eloquence and literary skill. If any man was devoted 

 to the cause of truth and determined to accept it whatever it might 

 prove to be, that man was Agassiz; for while his impulses were 

 notably devout and reverential, he proved, on many occasions, 

 that he was fearless and independent in the search for truth. It 

 is no disparagement to Buckland, and Bell, and Chalmers, and the 

 other authors of the Bridgewater Treatises to assert that Agassiz 

 far surpassed them all in acquaintance with the methods which 

 lead to success in the interpretation of nature, and in ability to 

 treat the problems of natural theology from the standpoint of the 

 zoologist. 



He handles the subject in a far more comprehensive way than 

 any of these writers, for he does not hesitate to assert that their 

 attempts to find evidence of design in the contrivances of living 

 bodies is unscientific and wrong in principle. 



" The argument for the existence of an intelligent Creator," he 

 tells us, " is generally drawn from the adaptation of means to ends, 

 upon which the Bridgewater Treatises, for example, have been 

 based. But this does not appear to me to cover the whole ground, 

 for we can conceive that the natural action of objects upon each 

 other should result in a final fitness of the universe, and thus pro- 

 duce a harmonious whole ; nor does the argument derived from the 

 connection of organs and functions seem to me more satisfactory, 

 for beyond certain limits it is not even true." 



He therefore attempts to put natural theology upon a much 

 broader basis; for he finds reason to believe that the facts which 

 are studied by the naturalist — the phenomena of geological succes- 

 sion and geographical distribution, of embryology and anatomy, of 

 systematic botany and zoology ; in a word, all the data of the natural 

 sciences — are a language in which the Creator tells us the story 

 of creation for our delight and instruction and advantage; and 



