314 NATURAL THEOLOGY. 



VIII. But if any one object to our representa- 

 tion, that the succession of day and night, or the 

 rotation of the earth upon which it depends, is 

 not resolvable into central attraction, we will refer 



But the most remarkable accommodation of the economy of 

 animals, and of the property of life itself in them, regards the 

 changes of the year rather than the diurnal change. How 

 much this prevails in the vegetable world, we have only to look 

 around us fully to comprehend. With the diminution of heat ve- 

 getation is nipped, the ova of insects locked up, and the food of 

 many animals withdrawn. Some animals could not be protected 

 by an instinct of migration, being without the means of passage : 

 the bat could not fly away with the swallow, nor the hedgehog 

 and dormouse travel with the deer. To sustain the animal heat 

 against the low temperature of the surrounding atmosphere, re- 

 quires a vigorous circulation of the blood, and a plentiful and un- 

 interrupted supply of food. Many animals must, therefore, have 

 died during the winter, had not nature supplied a means of their 

 continuance in life beyond the ingenuity of man to conceive. The 

 warmth of their clothing, and the instincts to build themselves a 

 warm habitation, which we should almost say were the exercise 

 of ingenuity, are insufficient. To sustain life they must hold it 

 by a new tenure. Accordingly the necessity for food is removed ; 

 the activity of the circulation is diminished remarkably ; a torpor 

 seizes upon every living faculty, and they fall into what seems a 

 long sleep. Yet it is not sleep, but a new condition of existence, 

 in which life is preserved without the necessity for food, and when 

 all the functions of the system are let down to a lower state of ac- 

 tivity. And justly, therefore, it has been said that in these tilings 

 we trace the benevolence of the Creator, "who did not cast his 

 living creatures into the world to prosper or perish as they might 

 find it suited to them or not, but fitted together with the nicest 

 skill the M'orld and the constitution which he gave to its inhabi- 

 tants ; so fashioning it, that light and darkness, sun and air, moist 

 and dry, should become their ministers and benefactors, the un- 

 wearied and unfailing causes of their well-being." — WhcweWs 

 Brids;eivater Treatise. 



