245 
that those oaks might annually produce, together with all their annual leaves; 
and again, all the younger oaks which might be produced from each of 
these acorns in ten thousand collateral successions: now this raises the 
number to such millions of millions, that nothing but the incomprehensible 
idea of infinite can ever be supposed to answer; and at best, in this contro- 
versy, it seems rather to be a refuge of darkness to hide in, than a clear 
explication. 
4. We find many plants may be produced by slips or twigs of the same 
plant, and that of trees as well as herbs and flowers, such as the vine, 
willow, &c. And it is not to be supposed that each twig and slip have all 
these future seeds and trees actually formed in them , together with all their 
leaves and fruits the first week of the creation, even though we should allow 
every seed to contain all these infinite successions of their species. 
5. * Have we not reason to conceive that every seed of a plant is formed 
alike? Has not then every acorn and every bean that is devoured by ani¬ 
mals for their food, and every grain of corn, as well as all the fruits of the 
trees and their seeds which are eaten by men and birds, the same millions 
of these complete trees or plants, corn or herbage, contained in them in 
miniature which are ascribed to those other seeds and fruits which are 
actually sown or planted out, in order to produce new vegetables of their 
own kind? Now if it be so, what an infinite number of complete trees, 
flowers, plants, and herbs, would be made by the exquisite artifice of the 
Creator to no purpose? And thus a vastly greater part of the original and 
immediate workmanship of God in the first week of creation would be labour 
in vain, since none of it attains its proper end, but only in those few seeds 
and fruits which afterwards grew up into complete plants or trees. 
0. When a limb of an animal, or some necessary part of a plant, has 
been broken off, what powerful efforts have sometimes been observed in the 
operations of nature towards the formation of a new limb, or part of the same 
kind? I have seen the claw of a crab rising up in a less form, in the room 
of one which the creature seems to have been deprived of by some injurious 
accident: now I would inquire, whether this creature was formed at first, in 
its minute original, with three claws? Or whether there was an actual pro¬ 
vision made for every such accident in the first week of the creation? 
In the vegetable world these regular productions of the new parts of a 
plant are much more common. When the top of an ash is cut off to make 
a pollard of it, or of a plumb-tree to make it bear more, or better fruit, I beg 
3 Q 
