17 
lives of one great class in the articulated di¬ 
vision of the animal kingdom. We do not find 
this instrument passing onwards, as it were, 
through a series of experimental changes, 
from more simple into more complex forms ; 
it was created at the very first, in the fulness 
of perfect adaptation to the uses and condition 
of the class of creatures, to which this kind 
of eye has ever been, and is still appropriate* 
“ If we should discover a microscope, or 
telescope, in the hand of an Egyptian mum¬ 
my, or beneath the mins of Herculaneum, it 
would be impossible to deny that a knowledge 
of the principles of optics existed in the mind 
by which such an instrument had been con¬ 
trived. The same inference follows, but with 
cumulative force, when we see nearly four 
hundred microscopic lenses set side by side, 
in the compound eye of a fossil trilobite; and 
the weight of the argument is multiplied a 
thousand fold, when we look to the infinite 
variety of adaptations by which similar in¬ 
struments have been modified, through end¬ 
less genera and species, from the long-lost 
2 * 
