4i6 NATURE AND MAN, 



sidering, I am quite willing to admit, in limine, that the mere 

 adaptiveness of a thing to a particular purpose, is often a very 

 unsafe ground for concluding that it was devised for that purpose. 

 For cases are constantly occurring, in which we find ourselves 

 able to turn some instrument to a use altogether different from 

 that for which it was intended by its maker ; and every one who 

 lias had much experience of changes of residence (as happened 

 to myself in early life), has found pieces of his furniture fitting 

 into appropriate recesses just as exactly "as if they had been 

 made for them." But I rest my argument on cases in which 

 the idea of such casual adaptiveness is altogether excluded by the 

 accumulation of separate and independent evidentiary facts, all 

 indicative of the same purpose ; and I shall further show you that 

 it is not invalidated (as Professor Huxley has maintained it to be) 

 by a possible misapprehension of that purpose ; the evidence of 

 a "design" being the same, even though we may be mistaken as 

 to what that design was. 



Necessarily limiting myself to two typical illustrations, I shall 

 select one of a very simple nature, in which conviction is produced 

 by the accumulation of similar evidentiary probabilities, each of 

 which — taken individually — is of the slightest character and the 

 lowest value, their probative force depending entirely on their 

 collocation ; whilst in the other I shall show that our conviction 

 rests on the elaborate character of the constructive arrangements 

 by which a small number of separate but dissimilar adaptations 

 are so combined as to work out a single product. 



About thirty years ago we began to hear a good deal about 

 "flint implements." They had not been altogether unknown 

 previously, as specimens of them were to be found in museums 

 of antiquities ; but they had never been brought to light in such 

 numbers, and under such very peculiar circumstances, as in the 

 working of the gravel beds of the valley of the Somme, near 

 Abbeville and Amiens. The matter was brought into notice by 

 M. Boucher de Perthes, a distinguished antiquarian and collector 

 at Abbeville. English men of science went over to study the 

 conditions under which these flint implements were found ; and 

 very soon satisfied themselves of the genuineness and importance 

 of this discovery. There were many who at first denied that they 



