COMPAllATlYE ANATOMY. Ii3 



CHAPTER XII 



COMPARATIVE ANATOMY. 



WHENE\nER we find a general plan pursued, yet with 

 such variations in it as are, in each ease, required by the 

 particular exigency of the subject to which it is applied, we 

 possess, in such a plan and such adaptation, the strongest 

 evidence that can be afforded of intelligence and design — an 

 evidence Avhich the most completely excludes every other 

 hypothesis. If the general plan proceeded from any fixed 

 necessity in the nature of things, how could it accommodate 

 itself to the various wants and uses which it had to serve 

 imder different circumstances and on different occasions ? 

 Ark Wright's mill was invented for the spinning of cotton. 

 We see it employed for the spinning of wool, flax, and hemp, 

 with such modifications of the original principle, such variety 

 in the same plan, as the texture of those difierent materials 

 rendered necessary. Of the machine's being put together 

 with design, if it were possible to doubt while we saw it 

 only under one mode, and in one form, when we came to 

 observe it in its difierent applications, with such changes of 

 structure, such additions and supplements, as the special and 

 particular use in each case demanded, we could not refuse 

 any longer our assent to the proposition, "that intelligence, 

 properly and strictly so called — including, under that name, 

 foresight, consideration, reference to utility — had been em- 

 ployed, as well in the primitive plan as in the several changes 

 and accommodations which it is made to undergo." 



"Very much of this reasoning is applicable to what has 

 been called comparative anatomy. In their general econ- 

 omy, in the outlines of the plan, in the construction as well 

 as offices of their principal parts, there exists between all 

 large terrestrial animals a close resemblance. In all, life is 

 sustained, and the body nourished, by nearly the same appa- 



