11 
WHAT TO BELIEVE IN SCIENCE: TELEOLOGrY 
OB EVOLUTION. 
By the Bey. T. E. E. STUBBING, M.A. 
T HE Science which deals with the evidences of design or 
purpose is Teleology , the science of final causes. A final 
cause is that for the sake of which anything is produced or 
done. The old lady who found a burglar in her store-closet, 
asked him for the final cause of his presence in that singular 
situation when she said, “ What brings you here, sir ? ” In 
answering, “ Why, ma’am, one must be somewheres,” he evi- 
dently adopted the theory that all things, the movements of 
human beings included, are not by purpose but by chance, and 
that therefore it was idle under any circumstances to ask the 
reason why. Of that theory Archdeacon Paley effectually 
disposed many years ago, in his famous and popular treatise on 
Natural Theology. His whole argument is an argument from 
final causes. The same argument, and after much the same 
method, is pursued in another delightful book, the Bridgewater 
Treatise on 66 The Hand ; its Mechanism and Vital Endowments, 
as evincing Design,” by Sir Charles Bell. No one, indeed, will 
believe that the flexor perforans of the finger found its way 
through the flexor perforatus only by accident, just where the 
confined space of the narrow elongated digit made it all but 
essential that one of these muscles should pass through a hole 
in the other. No one, understanding the anatomy of the arm, 
and how the phalanges of the fingers are bent and straightened 
chiefly by muscles lying along the front and back of the fore- 
arm, would for a moment admit that the long terminal tendons 
of those muscles are bound down by the annular ligament at 
the wrist only through a lucky coincidence. 
We are content, and may well be so, to recognise personal 
agency and design in the construction of a watch, a micro- 
scope, a steam-engine, without having seen them made or 
knowing the makers; and since we are surrounded by con- 
trivances analogous, though in important particulars superior, 
to these contrivances, many of them long antecedent to the 
