PLANTS AND ANIMALS. 
33 
-he form of the thing produced. The plant has no de¬ 
sign in producing the seed, no comprehension of the na¬ 
ture or use of what it produces; the bird with respect to its 
egg, is not above the plant with respect to its seed. Neith¬ 
er the one nor the other bears that sort of relation to what 
proceeds from them, which a joiner does to the chair which 
he makes. Now a cause, which bears this relation to the 
effect, is what we want, in order to account for the suita¬ 
bleness of means to an end, the fitness and fitting of one 
thing to another, and this cause the parent plant or ani¬ 
mal does not supply. 
It is farther observable concerning the propagation of 
plants and animals, that the apparatus employed exhibits 
no resemblance to the thing produced; in this respect 
holding an analogy with instruments and tools of art. The 
filaments, antherae, and stigmata of flowers, bear no more 
resemblance to the young plant, or even to the seed, which 
is formed by their intervention, than a chisel or a plane 
does to a table or chair. What then are the filaments, 
antherae, and stigmata of plants, but instruments strictly 
so called? * 
III. We may advance from animals which bring forth 
eggs, to animals which bring forth their young alive: and 
of this latter class, from the lowest to the highest; from 
irrational to rational life, from brutes to the human species; 
* Nearly akin to the reproduction of plants and animals by generation, 
is the reproduction of parts of animal bodies which have been destroyed, 
and the reparation of those which have been injured. To say nothing of 
the reproduction of limbs in crustaceous animals, the wonderful but well 
attested fact, of the formation of a new eye in an animal of the iizard kind, 
in the place of one which had been cut out of the socket, is one which no 
atheistical theory can approach, in the way of explanation. In the pro¬ 
cess by which a new eye is formed, the apparatus, instruments and 
materials, employed, bear no resemblance to the organ to be formed. The 
small capillary vessels of the root of the eye, construct a new eye, out of 
the blood which circulates in them. To use a mode of expression like 
that of our author—the vessels which thus construct a new eye, bear no 
more resemblance to it, than a chisel or a plane, to a table or a chair; and 
the blood out of which it is made, no more resemblance to it when made, 
than the metallic ores when taken out of the mine, to a complete and 
perfectly constructed watch. In this case, we find a contrivance exist¬ 
ing in a whole race of animals, for the accomplishment of a purpose 
which it is not called upon to accomplish in one instance out of a thousand. 
If the reader will examine the several atheistical modes of evading the force 
of the arguments for the existence of God, referred to in the next 
chapter, as well as in various other parts of this volume, he will find that 
they signally fail in their application to this case.— Ed. 
