90 PROFESSOR OWEN ON THE AYE-AYE. 
with the conception of the constitution of an organized species by the operation of forces 
and influences which are part of the ordained system of things ; and if the nature of such 
operation be not comprehended, it, at least, may be a legitimate subject of an endeavour 
at comprehension. ‘The human intellect has power so to conceive the relations of numbers 
as to give expression to such conception, for example, by the terms of the ‘ Binomial 
Theorem’; and successive mathematicians concur in accepting and using the theorem 
as the true expression of such cognition. As the human intellect has been framed by 
its Author, it could not otherwise best express such numerical relations ; and this impos- 
sibility of any other relation between the conception and expression of the theorem 
may be stated in terms not unusual with the old scholastic disputants, but jarring 
against later and better taste, viz. that “God himself could not abrogate such neces- 
Sary result of the necessary relations of numbers.” 
And, nevertheless, that result may be, and by the healthy human mind, in careful 
thought, is felt to be, a high act of creative power ; and the appreciation of its necessity 
is an endowment which engenders in such mind a spirit of grateful devotion. 
So, also, conditions of existence have a creative cause, as well as the animals related 
to those conditions. Constructed as we find them, animals are necessarily so related, 
and must be affected by every change in such conditions. 
But if we can conceive such conditions to change agreeably with the laws of their 
being,—the crust of the earth, e. g., having been created to move up and down, affecting 
its relations to water, air, temperature, and other circumstances influencing living 
beings,—these beings and their dwelling-place having been created as they are, with 
such interdependencies, the changes are necessary, may be called fatalistic, and 
yet are not the less a preordained result of the Creator of the arrangements, 
foreseeing the consequences of a long-continued series of operations and -influences, 
educing new adjustments and developments out of efforts and exercises of organs 
stimulated by surrounding changes, or out of slight departures from parental form ; 
which change of organs by change of exercise, and which congenital deviations or 
varieties, were equally a fore-ordained property of the living species. 
Whether such considerations be evidence of careless thinking, and whether, as 
some affirm, they blot God out of creation’, may be left to the judgment of sound and 
unbiassed intellects. 
The adaptation of the earth to our well-being, by its waters and lands, with localized 
coal, chalk, &c., through secondary causes which have developed the present varied 
condition of its surface by means of slow physical and organic operations through long 
‘ On the appearance of the work in which I first expressed the opinion that the “orderly succession and 
progression of organic phenomena were the result of natural laws or secondary causes,” whilst admitting 
ignorance of their nature or mode of operation (‘Nature of Limbs,’ 8vo, 1849, p. 86), I was assailed as 
follows :—‘‘ But it is not German Naturalists alone who are contributing to diffuse scientific Pantheism. We 
have in England an anatomist and physiologist, Richard Owen, who, in a lecture on the ‘Nature of Limbs,’ 
