77 
sidering the argument from Design. For, simple as it sounds, 
if once admitted, it shatters to fragments the ever-shiftiug 
systems of the universe which recognise only Matter and 
Force. Great then is the bitterness with which the Material- 
ists assail teleology. We may fairly ask why are they so 
envenomed on this subject, so incapable of judicial calmness ? 
Is it because of the lurking suspicion that, do what they will, 
the argument is indestructible ? A man reads volume after 
volume of wordy and hazy disputation, in which the meaning 
is usually in inverse proportion to the length of the words in 
which it is disguised ; he then goes out into the fields, he 
picks up a butterfly, a beetle, or a flower, and all the arguments 
against Design seem to melt away like the mist before the 
sun. He thinks of Tennyson^s lines about a sea-shell : — 
“ Frail, but a work divine, 
Made so fairily well 
With delicate spire and whorl, 
How exquisitely minute 
A miracle of design ! ” 
In concluding these introductory remarks, I do not claim 
for a moment that the argument from Design amounts to 
demonstration. It is logically a high probability; it is an 
instinctive, deep-seated conviction, produced by the observa- 
tion of countless particular instances, and it is, moreover, a 
reasonable conviction which admits of defence. But as an 
argument its value is that of a high degree of probability, an 
approach to demonstration which certainly cannot be predi- 
cated of any material explanation of the universe. 
Part II. 
8. Let us now advance to some of the arrangements which 
appear to indicate Design in the Vegetable Kingdom. First 
and foremost comes the great office of plants, that of sup- 
plying food to the animal world. On this planet we know by 
observation that animals are so constituted that they cannot 
feed exclusively upon inorganic materials, — upon air, water, 
and minerals. No instance has yet been known of an animal, 
an undoubted animal, which exists upon such food. Here 
comes in the function of the Vegetable Kingdom. Standing 
between the mineral and animal world, it manufactures food 
out of the former in order to supply the wants of the latter. 
As this generalisation is the most important point in my 
paper, I shall cite three eminent scientific men to show that 
there is no tendency whatever at the present day to call it 
