108 G. cox BOMPAS, F.G.S., T.K.G.S., ETC., ON 



The races of man if their multiplication were unchecked 

 might in a few centuries fill up this globe, but the reproduc- 

 tive power of some of the lower animals, fishes or insects, is 

 thousands or milHons of times greater than that of man. How 

 is the balance of nature preserved, unless the same Creator 

 who pours out this flood of life has planned and set its 

 bounds ? 



Food, another cogent factor in building up the forms of 

 life, is itself the supply of animal and vegetable life there- 

 fore not chance, but due to the Author of life ; and who will 

 affirm that sun and earth, climate and land and sea, which help 

 to mould the forms of animated nature, are freaks of chance'? 



Insects are endowed with taste, smell, and sight, which 

 lead them to various flowers stored with honey, breathing 

 fragrance, and dressed in bright colours, and by the insects' 

 visits the flowers are fructified. The mutual adaptation of 

 insect and flower has grown with the evolution of both. 

 Are the life faculties, the hisect senses an endowment, and 

 the existence of flowers a chance? Neither the insect nor 

 the flower could become adapted to the other unless each 

 had the special life and growth and variability required to 

 make the one the complement of the other, and with these 

 each has been endowed. Is it a reasonable hypothesis that 

 the two being thus endowed were brought together by a 

 chance coincidence of circumstances to work out each other's 

 development ? 



The ocellated plumage of the peacock and Argus pheasant 

 has been ascribed by Darwin to the gradual influence of 

 female preference ; by Wallace to superabundant vitality in 

 the male ; but this preference or vitahty and the variability 

 of the feather on which they act are alike characters of life, 

 and therefore e v^idence of design. 



Like reasoning may be applied to every animal structure 

 and to the whole order of nature, showing that natural and 

 sexual selection and the struggle for existence are not in- 

 dependent forces, but mainly the result of the interaction of 

 the forces of life, and therefore, like life itself, the ofi"spring 

 of design. 



Evolution is, moreover, admittedly subject to law ; but law 

 rightly understood implies design. It is the expression of 

 the will of the Law Giver ; and every law in proportion to 

 the wisdom of its Giver is adapted to control the varied 

 circumstances to which it is to apply. A perfect law would 

 be adapted to work out its ends in every circumstance. 



