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without any respect to the laws of acoustics — the heart without any reference 
to the laws of hydro-dynamics, though the ear and the heart display 
instruments as perfect — one with regard to the laws of sound, and the other 
to the most recondite problems of hydro-dynamics— as the eye manifests m 
regard to optics. But where is this backward imaginary pursuit to lead us— 
to an animal without eyes, without ears, without heart ? Can we stop here ? 
Must not nerves and arteries themselves have started from some chance 
production of such things in an animal destitute of them 1 Must we not go 
back to a monad with a homogeneous unstructureless mass of matter, in 
which life alone has been flashed by the Creator, and left to perfect itself, 
controlled only by one stem law, and profiting by no law of design, but 
simply that of chance ? Darwin would fain lead me back to this one simple 
monad as the progenitor of all the creatures of the animate world. But he 
admits that his proof, the proof credible to his own mind, fails him. He 
admits that his researches cannot reach this simplicity. He must start from 
some ten or twelve such commencements of life. But if from ten or twelve, 
why not twenty— if twenty, why not a hundred ? Why am I to limit the 
work of the Creator to the simultaneous or successive creations of ten or 
twelve commencements of the animate creation ? Why, simply for the 
purpose of evading the evidence of design as manifested in the adaptation of 
all the organs of every animate creature to its wants, which can only be done 
by so incredible a hypothesis as that of Mr. Darwin. I say fearlessly that 
any hypothesis which requires us to admit that the formation of such 
complex organs as the eye, the ear, the heart, the brain, with all their 
marvellous structures and mechanical adaptations to the wants of the 
creatures possessing them, so perfectly in harmony, too, with the laws of 
inorganic matter, affords no evidence of design — that such structures could be 
built up by gradual chance improvements, perpetuated by the law of trans- 
mission, and perfected by the destruction of creatures less favourably 
endowed— is so incredible that I marvel to find any thinking man capable of 
adopting it for a single moment. Mr. Darwin not only deprives us of any 
evidence of design in the physical structures of animate life, he would also 
eliminate that evidence from the psychological phenomena of living beings. 
He feels bound to bring the cell-making instinct of the hive-bee within the 
working of his hypothesis. He does not deny, as some of his admirers have 
endeavoured to do, the mathematical perfection of the cells constituting the 
honeycomb. He does not seek to evade the problem by the fiction of equal 
pressures, exerted by equal hemispheres pressing against each other. He 
does not ignore the fact that the angles of the terminal planes of the 
hexagonal cells were determined and measured long before there was any 
hypothesis as to their formation, and even before the mathematical problem 
was solved which showed that the bee’s cell was the only form which gave 
the greatest amount of store-room with the least possible expenditure of 
material. How does Mr. Darwin account for the hive-bee acquiring this 
marvellous instinct for making so perfect a mathematical structure ? Why a 
chance improvement in cell-making manifesting itself among a certain set of 
