26 FIN7\L CAUSES. 



in particular parts of its pipes and cisterns, with a 

 view to prevent the retrograde motion of the fluids 

 which are to pass through them. Can the valves 

 of the veins, or of the lymphatics, or of the heart 

 have a different object ; and are they not the result 

 of deliberate and express contrivance in the great 

 Mechanist of the living frame? 



The knowledge of the laws of electricity, in its 

 different forms, is one of the latest results which 

 science has revealed to man. Could these laws, 

 and their various combinations, have been unknown 

 to the Power who created the torpedo, and who 

 armed it with an energetic galvanic battery, con- 

 structed upon the most refined scientific principles, 

 for the manifest purpose of enabling the animal to 

 strike terror into its enemies, and paralyse their 

 efforts to assail it ? 



Does not the optician, who designedly places his 

 convex lens at the proper distance in a darkened 

 box, for the purpose of obtaining vivid pictures of 

 the external scene, evince his knowledge of the 

 laws of light, of the properties of refracting media, 

 and of the refined combinations of those media 

 by which each pencil is brought to a separate 

 focus, and adjusted to form an image of remote 

 objects? Does it not, in like manner, argue the 

 most profound knowledge and foresight in the 

 Divine Artist, who has so admirably hung the 

 crystalline lens of the eye in the axis of a spherical 

 case, in the fore part of which He has made a cir- 

 cular window for the light to enter, and spread out 

 on the opposite side a canvass to receive the picture ? 

 Has no thought been exercised in darkening the 

 walls of this camera obscura, and thus preventing 



