APPLICATION OF FOREGOING PRINCIPLES. 63 



that with chickens, as with men, signs of contrivance 

 are indeed signs of contrivance, however quick, subtle, 

 and untraceable, the contrivance may be ? Again, I 

 have heard people argue that though the chicken, when 

 nearly hatched, had such a glimmering of sense that 

 it pecked the shell because it wanted to get out, yet 

 that it is not conceivable that, so long before it was 

 hatched, it should have had the sense to grow the horny 

 tip to its bill for use when wanted. This, at any rate, 

 they say, it must have grown, as the persons previously 

 referred to would maintain, promiscuously. 



Now no one indeed supposes that the chicken does 

 what it does, with the same self-consciousness with 

 which a tailor makes a suit of clothes. Not any one 

 who has thought upon the subject is likely to do it 

 so great an injustice. The probability is that it knows 

 what it is about to an extent greater than any tailor 

 ever did or will, for, to say the least of it, many 

 thousands of years to come. It works with such absolute 

 certainty and so vast an experience, that it is utterly 

 incapable of following the operations of its own mind 

 as accountants have been known to add up long 

 columns of pounds, shillings, and pence, running the 

 three fingers of one hand, a finger for each column, up 

 the page, and putting the result down correctly at the 

 bottom, apparently without an effort. In the case of 

 the accountant, we say that the processes which his 

 mind goes through are so rapid and subtle as to elude 

 his own power of observation as well as ours. We do 

 not deny that his mind goes through processes of some 

 kind ; we very readily admit that it must do so, and 



