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woof. The exquisite variety of creative adjustments reposes on a basis of fundamental order: exhaustless specialities of adaptation are engrafted on a pervasive unity of type. But Morphology and Teleology-the recognition of a general Model and of specialized Modes

-can never be justly conceived as at schism till concessions to symmetry in works of human art are pronounced incompatible with a regard to use, or, again, till the skill of the consummate musician is held to be impeached by the simplicity of the strings. 53 Morphology, rightly viewed, is not the negation, but one grand phase of the revelation of plan. Teleology is the other. It has been by following the lamp of Final Cause, and obeying her beckoning hand, that the masters of anatomical and physiological science, from Galen to Cuvier, and from Harvey to Owen, have been guided to their splendid discoveries. 54 The method that is thus scientifically fruitful is, however, the great stumbling-block to all schemes of development, since it is the mainstay and bulwark of Natural Theology. It is impossible to ask, For what? without further asking, From Whom? The measure of the confidence with which Science assumes a use is that of the confidence with which Religion affirms an Author. "He that planted the ear,

shall He not hear? Or He that made the eye, shall He not see?" Not only has this argument been esteemed invulnerable by the most masculine reasoners among Christian divines, as Barrow and Paley, Chalmers and Whewell it has carried conviction, from the time of Socrates to that of Cuvier, throughout the foremost minds of the human race, and found almost its sole antagonists among spinners of cobwebs and dreamers of dreams. * Nowhere is the hallucination of perverted genius more apparent than in the insane vehemence with which Lucretius warns his reader against the imminent danger of being tempted to suppose that eyes were made to see, or feet and legs to walk. Mr. Darwin's more subdued though similar warning will meet, as it merits, a similar fate. The prints of Divine forethought, and the convictions they engender, are scattered over the face of universal nature, and ploughed into the very subsoil of the human mind.

28. On the field of Final Causes, then, with full feeling of the stake yet no fear for the issue, Natural Theology takes her stand, and offers battle to Natural Selection. Her strength is concentrated, though not exhausted, on two main positions. She appeals to the phenomena of animal framework; not only as exem* Appendix B.

plified in single organs, however wonderful, but in the co-adaptations and inter-dependence of entire organisms. Is human purpose, for instance, stamped on the destination of a balloon-unmistakeable from the conjunction of its texture with its contents; and shall we see no sign of higher purpose in the unique structure of a bird, with its incomparably more complicated apparatus for flight; the plumage combining so perfectly the conditions of warmth, lightness, and locomotive power, and the requisite buoyancy being subserved, not only by the inflation of air-cavities auxiliary to the lungs, but by the quill-like hollowing of the very bones ? 55 Shall we say that Thought underlies a silkbag, gaseously distended, while yet the marvellous living mechanism, as incapable as the other of self-production, but of which the other is so poor and bald a copy, implies no prevision of use? Nay; "for by the greatness and beauty of the creatures, proportionably the Maker of them is seen." 56 But, besides the fabric, though in close sympathy and concert with the fabric, Natural Theology rests her argument on the instincts of animals.* God instructs as well as constructs. Recondite problems which have stood the siege of meditation ever since geometers began to think, and which Isaac Newton

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left partially unsolved, surrender at last, and Eureka is cried over a very advent of illumination; only, however, that the victorious human intellect may peruse at its leisure the anticipation of the achievement, and the faultless transcript of the solution, in the hive-bee's cell.* It would of course be as reasonable to confound the brush with the painter, or the helm with the steersman, or the geometer's pen with the process of calculation it records, as this result with conscious forethought in the insect. If certain structures refer us of necessity to a Divine Architect, such instincts point as peremptorily to a Divine Implanter, and betoken the presence of a plenary inspiration. Not less clearly is the Bird a living balloon, than the Bee is an "animated tool." 57 This impression is not of yesterday. An old observer of bees has given voice to it in undying verse:

His quidam signis, atque hæc exempla secuti,
Esse apibus partem divinæ mentis et haustus
Ætherios dixere; Deum namque ire per omnes
Terrasque, tractusque maris, cœlumque profundum;
Hinc pecudes, armenta, viros, genus omne ferarum,
Quemque sibi tenues nascentem arcessere vitas. 58

29. If we except a passing cavil at the imperfect knowledge of optics displayed in the mechanism of the

* Appendix D.

eye,* Mr. Darwin can scarcely be said to have touched the evidence for design deduced from the felicities of fabric, and deep-lying adjustments, so profusely exemplified throughout the animal kingdom. He tells us indeed how the pigeon's feather may be varied, but not how the pigeon came to be feather-clad at all. He leaves us quite in the dark also as to the mode in which natural selection sets to work in the multiplying of airsacs, or in the boring of bones, to increase the facilities for flotation and flight. But he devotes a large portion of a chapter on Instinct, otherwise extremely graceful and interesting, to a hypothetical exposition of the processes by which the common hive-bee, Apis mellifica, might have distanced her less skilful kindred Melipona and Bombus; and how the wonderful phenomena of sexual suppression and vicarious labour might have arisen among the social insects of the bee and ant tribes generally. No one, since Touchstone's time, has set such store on the virtues, or so taxed the capacities of an If. A certain abstract theorem conceded, if Bombus or Melipona could be brought to put that theorem in practice, one huge stumbling-block would be removed from Mr. Darwin's speculative path. But this is the hitch. It is as much out of the question for * Appendix E.

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