58 NATURAL THEOLOGY. 



which the young animal is produced, or the con- 

 trivance manifested in the young animal itself, it 

 is not from the reason of the parent that any such 

 account can be drawn. He is the cause of his 

 offspring, in the same sense as that in which a gar- 

 dener is the cause of the tulip which grows upon 

 his parterre, and in no other. We admire the 

 flower ; we examine the plant ; we perceive the 

 conduciveness of many of its parts to their end 

 and office : we observe a provision for its nourish- 

 ment, growth, protection, and fecundity ; but we 

 never think of the gardener in all this. We attri- 

 bute nothing of this to his agency ; yet it may still 

 be true, that without the gardener we should not 

 have had the tulip. Just so it is with the succes- 

 sion of animals, even of the highest order. For 

 the contrivance discovered in the structure of the 

 thing produced, we want a contriver. The parent 

 is not that contriver : his consciousness decides 

 that question. He is in total ignorance why that 

 which is produced took its present form rather 

 than any other. It is for him only to be astonished 

 by the effect. We can no more look therefore to 

 the mtelligence of the parent animal for what we 

 are in search of — a cause of relation, and of sub- 

 serviency of parts to their use, which relation and 

 subserviency we see in the procreated body — 

 than we can refer the internal conformation of an 

 acorn to the intelligence of the oak from which it 

 dropped, or the structure of the watch to the in- 

 telligence of the watch which produced it : there 



