ARGUMENT CONTINUED. 
37 
proportion; and, perhaps, have never been submitted to a 
trial and examination sufficiently accurate, long enough 
continued, or often enough repeated. No accounts which 
I have seen are satisfactory. The mutilated animal may 
live and grow fat, (as was the case of the dog deprived of 
its spleen,) yet may be defective in some other of its func¬ 
tions; which, whether they can all, or in what degree of 
vigor and perfection, be performed, or how long preserv¬ 
ed, without the extirpated organ, does not seem to be as¬ 
certained by experiment. But to this case, even were it 
fully made out, may be applied the consideration which we 
suggested concerning the watch, viz. that these superfluous 
parts do not negative the reasoning which we instituted 
concerning those parts which are useful, and of which we 
know the use. The indication of contrivance, with re¬ 
spect to them, remains as it was before. 
III. One atheistic way of replying to our observations 
upon the works of nature, and to the proofs of a Deity 
which we think that we perceive in them, is to tell us, that 
all which we see must necessarily have had some form, and 
that it might as well be its present form as any other. Let 
us now apply this answer to the eye, as we did before to 
the watch. Something or other must have occupied that 
place in the animal's head; must have filled up, we will 
say, that socket: we will say also, that it must have been 
of that sort of substance which we call animal substance, 
as flesh, bone, membrane, cartilage, &c. But that it should 
have been an eye, knowing as we do, what an eye com¬ 
prehends,—viz. that it should have consisted, first, of a se¬ 
ries of transparent lenses (very different, by the by, even in 
their substance, from the opaque materials of which the rest 
of the body is, in general at least, composed; and with 
which the whole of its surface, this single portion of it ex¬ 
cepted, is covered:) secondly, of a black cloth or canvass 
(the only membrane of the body which is black) spread 
out behind these lenses, so as to receive the image formed 
by pencils of light transmitted through them; and placed 
at the precise geometrical distance at which, and at which 
alone, a distinct image could be formed, namely, at the 
concourse of the refracted rays: thirdly, of a large nerve 
communicating between this membrane and the brain; 
without which, the action of light upon the membrane, 
however modified by the organ, would be lost to the pur¬ 
poses of sensation:—that this fortunate conformation of 
parts should have been the lot, not of one individual out 
pf many thousand individuals, like the great prize in a lot- 
D 
