The Question at Issue 81 
design all on the part of one and the same person. Nor 
yet was it unmixed with chance ; many a detail has been 
doubtless due to an accident or coincidence which was 
forthwith seized and made the best of. Luck there always 
has been and always will be, until all brains are opened, 
and all connections made known, but luck turned to account 
becomes design ; there is, indeed, if things are driven home, 
little other design than this. The telescope, therefore, is 
an instrument designed in all its parts for the purpose of 
seeing, and, take it all round, designed with singular skill. 
Looking at the eye, we are at first tempted to think that 
it must be the telescope over again, only more so; we are 
tempted to see it as something which has grown up little 
by little from small beginnings, as the result of effort well 
applied and handed down from generation to generation, 
till, in the vastly greater time during which the eye has 
been developing as compared with the telescope, a vastly 
more astonishing result has been arrived at. We may indeed 
be tempted to think this, but, according to Mr. Darwin, 
we should be wrong. Design had a great deal to do with 
the telescope, but it had nothing or hardly anything what- 
ever to do with the eye. The telescope owes its develop- 
ment to cunning, the eye to luck, which, it would seem, 
is so far more cunning than cunning that one does not quite 
understand why there should be any cunning at all. 
The main means of developing the eye was, according to 
Mr. Darwin, not use as varying circumstances might direct 
with consequent slow increase of power and an occasional 
happy flight of genius, but natural selection. Natural 
selection, according to him, though not the sole, is still 
the most important means of its development and modifica- 
tion.* What, then, is natural selection ? 
Mr. Darwin has told us this on the title-page of the 
“ Origin of Species.” He there defines it as “ The Preserva- 
tion of Favoured Races ;”’ “ Favoured” is ‘ Fortunate,” 
* “ Origin of Species,” ed.i., p. 6; see also p. 43. 
F 
