DESIGN IN THE ORGANIC WORLD. 435 



greater comprehensiveness. For we must then regard our one 

 ancestral germ-particle as endowed with a " potentiality " of pro- 

 gressive development, that has been equal to the peopling of our 

 globe with all that vast variety of living creatures, by some or 

 other of which it has been inhabited through all save the remotest 

 periods of its ever-changing history to the present time. That 

 this progressive development has taken place according to an 

 orderly succession, the study of which will ultimately enable us to 

 frame "laws" that shall express the conditions of the "perturba- 

 tions " as well of the '* uniformities " of genetic descent, is the 

 belief of every philosophic Biologist. But when biological science 

 shall have reached this elevated point, it will have revealed to us 

 only the Order of the evolutionary process, leaving us still to seek 

 for its Cause. But how much grander a conception of that order 

 do we obtain, when we are thus led to regard it as embodied 

 in one original design continuously working itself out through 

 the ages, in constant harmony with the changes contemporane- 

 ously taking place in the condition of the terrestrial surface, than 

 when we suppose it to have needed successive interpositions for 

 re-adaptation to those changes as they successively occurred ! 



But, it is affirmed, there is nothing in this adaptation that 

 cannot be accounted for by " Natural Selection." As changes took 

 place in their " environment," variations occurred in the living 

 inhabitants ; some of these were favourable to their new conditions, 

 some were the reverse ; the fittest survived, the unfit became 

 extinct J and thus those "adaptations" came about in the natural 

 course of things, for which theologians have needlessly invoked 

 the " design " of a Dens ex machina. In one of those most able 

 expositions of the doctrine of the " Origin of Species by Natural 

 Selection," by which Professor Huxley very early impressed the 

 educated public with the scientific value of the new views which 

 Mr. Darwin had opened out, he remarked that nothing had more 

 strongly impressed him than the fact that they had completely 

 disposed of the old teleological argument; the adaptations in 

 organized structures which had been regarded as evidences of 

 "design" being sufiiciently accounted for as results of the " sur- 

 " vival of the fittest." And this view of the case has been so 



