CHAPTER XXXI 

 1876 



The year 1876 was again a busy one, almost as busy as 

 any that went before. As in 1875, his London work was 

 cut in two by a course of lectures in Edinburgh, and sittings 

 of the Royal Commission on Scottish Universities, and fur- 

 thermore, by a trip to America in his summer vacation. 



In the winter and early spring he gave his usual lectures 

 at South Kensington ; a course to working men " On the 

 Evidence as to the Origin of Existing Vertebrated Animals," 

 from February to April {Nature, vols. xiii. and xiv.) ; a lec- 

 ture at the Royal Institution (January 28) " On the Border 

 Territory between the Animal and Vegetable Kingdoms " 

 {Coll. Essays, viii. 170); and another at Glasgow (February 

 15) " On the Teleology and Morphology of the Hand." 



In this lecture, which he never found time to get into 

 final shape for publication, but which was substantially re- 

 peated at the Working Men's College in 1878, he touched 

 upon one of the philosophic aspects of the theory of evolu- 

 tion, namely, how far is it consistent with the argument 

 from design? 



Granting provisionally the force of Paley's argument in 

 individual cases of adaptation, and illustrating it by the hand 

 and its representative in various of the Mammalia, he pro- 

 ceeds to show by the facts of morphology that the argu- 

 ment, as commonly stated, fails ; that each mechanism, each 

 animal, was not specially made to suit the particular purpose 

 we find it serving, but was developed from a single com- 

 mon type. Yet in a limited and special sense he finds 

 teleology to be not inconsistent with morphology. The 



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