MODERN SCIENCE AND NATURAL RELIGION. 129 
blocks of salt are self-posited, being fixed in their places 
by the forces with which they act upon each other.” But 
the gifted scientist goes on to apply this manifestation of 
“mechanical law,’’ this outcome of this force, to vegetable and 
animal life, to the arrangement of “self-posed” molecules 
in a grain of corn and in every portion of the animal frame, 
so that “an intellect, the same in kind as our own,—if only 
sufficiently expanded, —would be able to follow the whole 
process from beginning to end,” and “ with the necessary 
data, the chick might be deduced as rigorously and as 
logically from the egg as the existence of Neptune from the 
disturbances of Uranus.’’? Moreover, he goes on to say there 
is a necessity underlying the molecular action, ‘as the motion 
of the hands of a watch follow of necessity from the inner 
mechanism of the watch when acted upon by the force in- 
vested in the spring, the phenomena of nature have their inner 
mechanism, and their store of force to set that mechanism 
going.” 
Professor Huxley is equally definite in his testimony. He 
says, speaking of the development of the jobster from “a 
semi-fluid mass of yolk not so big as a pin’s head, contained 
in a transparent membrane, and exhibiting not the least trace 
of any one of those organs, whose multiplicity and complexity 
in the adult are so surprising,” appeals to this development as 
a proof of unity of plan, and says: ‘Thus the study of develop- 
ment proves that the doctrine of unity of plan is not merely a 
fancy, that it is not merely one way of looking at the matter, 
but that it is the expression of deep-seated natural facts.” 
Again, he says: ‘Suppose we had known nothing of the 
lobster but as an inert mass, an organic crystal,—if I may use 
the phrase,—and that we could suddenly see it exerting all 
these powers, what wonderful new ideas and new questions 
would arise in our minds! The great new question would 
be, How does all this take place? ‘The chief new idea would 
be the idea of adaptation to purpose,—the notion that the 
constituents of animal bodies are not mere unconnected parts, 
but organs working together to an end”; but he goes even 
further than this. He says: ‘‘ All who are competent to 
express an opinion on the subject are at present agreed 
that the manifold varieties of animal and vegetable life have 
not either come into existence by chance, nor result from 
capricious exertions of creative power, but that they have 
taken place in a definite order, the statement of which order 
is what men of science term a natural law,’ and while their 
deductions are so distinct from what they accept as facts, they 
are confident that these conclusions will not be modified, 
VOL. XXIII. K 
