254 THE FOUNDATIONS OF ZOOLOGY 



which are shown by a falling stone. When Paley's argument 

 seemed so conclusive to Darwin, he had studied Lyell ; nor did 

 he doubt at all that the history of the earth, as we find it 

 recorded in the rocks, is also part of the same orderly system of 

 nature, and the changes now going on upon its surface part of 

 the same orderly history. No one finds any death-blow to teleology 

 in our confidence that the future history of the earth, and of the 

 solar system, and of the stellar universe will be an orderly extension 

 of its past history ; and, far from asking whether this view of 

 astronomy is rational, the teleologist asserts that an impregnable 

 basis for his argument must be sought in the fact that it is 

 rational ; for if instead of order we discovered only a chaotic or 

 unintelligible history, which afforded no ground for reasonable 

 expectation as to the future, it is hard to see where he could 

 find any basis for his argument, for this seems to be founded on 

 our confidence in the order of nature. 



Paley himself points out that, far from weakening his argu- 

 ment, the appearance of new individual organisms, in the course 

 of nature, by birth, is its very strength ; and he argues that if 

 the finder of a watch should find that it possessed the property 

 of producing, in the course of its movements, other watches like 

 itself, and so on indefinitely, this discovery would increase his 

 admiration of the consummate skill of the contriver. "Though 

 it be no longer probable that the individual watch which our 

 observer had found was made immediately by the hand of an 

 artificer, yet doth not the alteration in any wise affect the inference 

 that an artificer hath been originally employed and concerned in 

 the production. The argument from design and contrivance 

 remains as it was. Marks of design and contrivance are no 

 more accounted for now than they were before. Our going back 

 ever so far brings us no nearer to the least degree of satisfaction 

 upon the subject." 



This passage shows that no death-blow can have been given 

 to his argument by anything inherent in the demonstration of the 

 mutability of species, in itself ; and that the blow must have 

 fallen upon some preconception of the matter ; for if any find 

 evidence of contrivance in the anatomical structure and in the 

 functional activity of the human heart, for example, and in its 



