ORGAN OF SIGHT. 41 



very anxious to teach, but whom they are really 

 trying to astonish only. 



61. Organ of sight. The eye, the result of a long 

 series of the most marvellous developmental changes, 

 at last appears an organ, the mere structure of the 

 nervous part of which has not even yet been thoroughly 

 elucidated. There is not a portion of the eye that 

 will not excite admiration on the part of the student 

 who investigates it. The adaptation of every struc- 

 ture to the work it will have to perform is most 

 remarkable, and when we consider that this organ, use- 

 less without light and formed for light, was produced 

 in utter darkness, it is difficult indeed to understand 

 how anyone can venture to adopt the belief that the 

 various arrangements of tissues are due to the opera- 

 tion of external circumstances, and the properties of 

 the mere matter of the body. From the very first the 

 perfect form the organ was to assume must, as it were, 

 have been determined and foreseen. To say that the 

 fully formed eye existed potentially in the masses of 

 bioplasm, from which its tissues were formed, neither 

 indicates scientific knowledge, nor a love of accuracy, 

 nor candour. The very matter was absent, out of 

 which these tissues were to be formed, and yet their 

 formation was prepared for, and, as it were, antici- 

 pated from the very first. All the early and most im- 

 portant changes in the development of an eye cannot 

 be attributed to the operation of any external condi- 

 tions whatever. They must be due to forces or powers 

 acting from within, and influencing the matter con- 

 stituting the bioplasm at the time, and these forces 

 and powers exhibit nothing whatever in common with 

 any known forces, properties, or powers of non-living 

 matter. 



Mr. Darwin remarks that the telescope " has been 

 perfected by the long- continued efforts of the highest 

 human intellect" ; and, he says, we " naturally infer (!) 

 that the eye has been formed by a somewhat anala- 



