56 PRESENT-DAY RATIONALISM 



mental forces, or whatever we call them, in the most 

 admirable manner. Then if the stimulus be kept up 

 by the organism and its offspring continually living 

 under the same conditions of life, the changed organs 

 become fixed and hereditary, as is abundantly seen under 

 cultivation and domesticity. 



Man has often found that he cannot do better than 

 imitate natural phenomena ; whenever he wants some 

 special contrivance as in engineering structures. If I 

 remember rightly, the iron " cells " on the top of the 

 Menai bridge were suggested by the structure of a bar- 

 nacle. Fox's iron-fluted stays of the umbrella are 

 precisely like hundreds of leaf-stalks ; in which the 

 edges are raised forming lateral flanges, thereby resisting 

 the downward tendency to snap through the weight of 

 the blade. Girders are found in some climbing stems 

 as the " monkey's ladder," buttresses are added to trunks 

 of trees, etc. 



The structures of flowers possess adaptations to in- 

 sects, which furnished Darwin and others with admirable 

 illustrations of what one would have formerly said were 

 undoubtedly designed. 



The Argument of Design was considered by Huxley 

 to have received its death-blow by Darwinism ; and so 

 undoubtedly it would have been slain, had Darwinism 

 been true ; but, as I have elsewhere shown, ^ it does not 

 exist at all. Nevertheless Design must give way to 

 Adaptation. 



For if we accept Darwin's own alternative, namely, of 

 Definite Variations arising in response to the Direct 

 Action of the environment, we discover that if the 



' See address on Present Day Rotionnlism, ifilh an Examination of 

 Darrvinism, in " Christian Apologetics" (J. Murray), and in the Ap- 

 pendix, below, p. 145. 



