108 WALTER AU15KEY KIDD, M.D., M.K.C.S., F.Z.S., ON 



touch on these at all fully would overweight the argument 

 without rendering the general drift of all the lines of proof 

 more clear. It is enough to remark that purpose is implicit in 

 each and all of the vast number of plans adopted in different 

 ranks of animal life for the one object. To imagine tliat these 

 or any of the two preceding groups of adaptations could be the 

 results of clumsy gropings at the best apparatus, with here 

 and there a successful discovery, and that the former were 

 eliminated and the latter perpetuated by a purely mechanical 

 selection, the most generally fitted organism surviving, is to 

 stultify imagination not less than reason. 



The number of species of animal forms has been but roughly 

 estimated and, perhaps, may reach 2,000,000. But to take one 

 group out of the whole animal kingdom, we know that there- 

 are not fewer than 50,000 species of mollusca. 



When such approximate calculations are made and we reHect 

 that each individual out of the species of animals, or of the 

 50,000 species of mollusca, has teeming evidence of purpose 

 in each part of its body, we still have not sounded the depths 

 of the matter ; for, as was observed in the case of plants, there is 

 potential evidence ibr purpose in every dead, destroyed, "or- 

 fossil animal that has lived and died since the first division of 

 the living world into plants and animals took place. Such 

 evidence as this may be " taken as read." It is not dii ect 

 evidence, but its value depends upon an inference so cogent 

 t.liat it can only be ignored for the sake of getting the case into 

 Chancery, so to speak, and thus putting off the real question at 

 issue till a more convenient season — which will never come. 

 The evidence afforded by one particular species of animal, 

 highest of the Anthropoidea, man, is, if possible, more weighty, 

 because the physical and mental contrivances of this " paragon 

 of animals " are more familiar and perhaps more deeply under- 

 stood, and themselves more subtle, than any to be found in the 

 lower ranks of animal life. The twin sisters of anatomy and 

 physiology, which might philosophically be termed biology, are 

 even at the present time profoundly occupied with problems at 

 present mystei-ious, but whose margin of mystery is slowly and 

 surely receding ])efore inductive research, as at a falling tide 

 the solid shore encroaches upon the waters. A liie time and 

 the highest mental faculties directed by modern methods is all 

 too little to enable man to say of human physiology anything 

 more than "now we know in part." Every year adds to the 

 immense mass of physiological knowledge (much of which has 

 first to be unlearning) based upon scientfic experiment. And 



