TELEOLOGY OF THE EVOLUTIONIST. TJ 



who could not form a museum out of bricks and mortar, 

 but was forced to begin as if going to construct a 

 mansion, and after proceeding some way in this direc- 

 tion, altered his plan into a palace, and that again into 

 a museum ? Yet this is the sort of succession on which 

 organisms are constructed. The fact has long been 

 familiar ; how has it been reconciled with infinite 

 wisdom ? Let the following passage answer for a thou- 

 sand : — ' The embryo is nothing like the miniature of the 

 adult. For a long while the body in its entirety and 

 in its details, presents the strangest of spectacles. Day 

 by day and hour by hour, the aspect of the scene 

 changes, and this instability is exhibited by the most 

 essential parts no less than by the accessory parts. 

 One would say that nature feels her way, and only 

 reaches the goal after many times missing the path ' 

 (on dirait que la nature tatonne et ne conduit son oeuvre 

 a bon fin, qu'apres s'etre souvent trompee)." * 



The above passage does not, I think, affect the evi- 

 dence for design which we adduced in the preceding 

 chapter. However strange the process of manufacture 

 may appear, when the work comes to be turned out 

 the design is too manifest to be doubted. 



If the reader were to come upon some lawyer's deed 

 which dealt with matters of such imspeakable intricacy, 

 that it baffled his imagination to conceive how it could 

 ever have been drafted, and if in spite of this he were 

 to find the intricacy of the provisions to be made, 

 exceeded only by the ease and simplicity with which the 



• Quafrefttgea, 'Metamorphoses de I'Homme et des Animaux,' 1862, 

 p, 42 ; G. H. Lewes, ' Physioal Basis of Mind,' 1877, p. 83. 



