TWO PATHS, ONE GOAL. 



105 



of childhood, where imagination runs riot. But if we recognise 

 tliat there was purpose in a Mind which foresaw, calculated, 

 and prepared the conditions of the origin of life, we are working 

 at any rate in a rationally-conceived system of things. 



Taking the lowest view of the purpose implicit in terrestrial 

 life, we can affirm that life must have come into being in order 

 to be lived, propagated, and lerminated. Such an apparent 

 truism cuts away the ground from under the feet of the 

 agnostic in this second line of evidence, except he be an 

 avowed Pyrrhonist. 



3. The special adaptations found among organisms occupied 

 most of Paley's natural theology, and his exposition of them 

 remains most valuable. Temple recognises their value, and 

 holds that the force of Paley's argument is strengthened by 

 viewing adaptations in organisms as solved slowly rather than 

 produced in the mechanical and more crude way believed in 

 his day. No detailed reference can be made here to the amazing 

 wealth of purpose enwrapped in the plants and animals of the 

 globe. We may well conceive how vast it is when Weismann 

 could say, " All animated nature is adapted, and has been so 

 from the beginnings of life." Though he said once, in reply to 

 Lord Salisbury, that we must not assume the existence of a 

 designing force, for by so doing we should surrender the pre- 

 supposition of our research, viz., the coniprehensibility of 

 nature ; he also admitted that " there is nothing to prevent our 

 conceiving of a Creator as lying behind or within the forces of 

 nature, and being their ultimate cause.'' 



We may briefly refer to plants and animals, and a few 

 specimens of the adaptations found in them. In plants the 

 innumerable special adaptations may come under three heads, 

 those concerned with relation to the earth, air, or water in 

 which they live, with their nutritive functions, tiieir rep>roductive 

 functions. Under the first consider the root, stew., branches, 

 leaves, and hark, with the immense varieties of tliese, and their 

 special adaptations to many diffenng environments. Under the 

 second, what various processes subserving the nutrition of the 

 plant are contrived and carried out in diverse ways, the absorp- 

 tion of nutriment through root-hairs and rootlets of the root to 

 the stem, and its passage through the minute vessels of the 

 woody fibre as sap to the leaves and other parts of the plant, 

 the delicate chemical processes of elaboration of the sap in the 

 leaves under the action of sunlight, where it meets with the 

 carbon dioxide absorbed from the atmosphere. AVhat important 

 manufacturing processes are carried on in the leaves of plants, 



