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 dweUing-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 along-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 afiirm, 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 wliicli 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,' 



