How widely different from all this is the existing creation around us! Nature, through all her realms, clearly exhibits the Plans of far-reaching and allcomprehending Intelligence-design and adaptation, order, harmony and beauty, are everywhere apparent. Whether we contemplate the mutual relations and dependencies of the earth and the atmosphere, of sea and land, or of the vegetable kingdom and the animal, we discover each to be a system of admirable means to important ends, a system philosophic, complete, exquisite and beautiful in the highest degree. The more extended and thorough our study of the characters, habits and wants of animals, whether beasts or birds, reptiles or fishes, insects or worms, the more profoundly are we impressed with the wisdom and goodness displayed in their several allotments-every one being fitted for its habitation, and every habitation suited to its given occupants. In all the myriad bundles of living machinery enfolded in animal forms, there is not an organ, not a feature of construction, wherein human wisdom could suggest an improvement, or devise a change that would be for the benefit of the individual in its particular sphere and line of life. The further our researches go into the mechanism and physiology of plants and animals, louder and louder grow the calls for admiration, and the more and more absurd becomes the idea that such a rich and boundless concourse of living wonders should be the result of "fortuitous variations!"

"Nothing is more striking," says Agassiz, "throughout the animal and vegetable kingdoms, than the unity

of plan in the structure of the most diversified types. From pole to pole, in every longitude, mammalia, birds, reptiles, and fishes, exhibit one and the same plan of structure, involving abstract conceptions of the highest order, far transcending the broadest generalizations of man,—for it is only after the most laborious investigations that man has arrived at an imperfect understanding of this plan; and yet this logical connection, these beautiful harmonies, this infinite diversity in unity, are represented by some as the result of forces exhibiting no trace of intelligence, no power of thinking, no faculty of combination, no knowledge of time and space. If there. is anything which places man above all other beings in Nature, it is precisely the circumstance that he possesses those noble attributes without which, in their most exalted excellence and perfection, not one of these traits of relationship so characteristic of the great type of the animal and vegetable kingdoms can be understood or even perceived. How, then, could these relations have been devised without similar powers? If all these relations are almost beyond the reach of the mental powers of man, and if man himself is part and parcel of the whole system, how could this system have been called into existence if there does not exist One Supreme Intelligence as the Author of all things?"*

8. If we accept the theory of Development, we must abandon the guidance of common sense, and renounce the decisions of natural reason, for this hypothesis requires us

* See Essay on Classification, Sections II., IV.

Nay, more than all this-If "insensible and fortuitous variations," and not the Creator's wisdom and power, had peopled our planet, we might in reason and consistency expect to find its surface traversed by monsters hideous as ever portrayed by an artist's pencil, or conceived by a poet's fancy-plundering Harpies, with faces of women and the bodies and wings and claws of birds, flitting among the trees-horrid Centaurs, half men and half horses, ranging the mountains and the forests-horned and hairy Satyrs, having human bodies and goats' legs, grotesquely dancing in their retired dells -frightful Minotaurs, hybrids of men and oxen, devouring youths and maidens as their favorite pastureArguses fiercely glaring through a hundred different eyes-lawless Cyclopes sending sided glances from one huge eye-ball in the centre of their foreheads, as they skulked back to their villanous caves caves-two-faced Januses, seeing alike before and behind-giant Briareuses, armed for fight with a hundred fists-nine-headed Hydras, wading and hissing through the marsheswatching Cerberuses, snarling out of fifty throatsCecropses, part men and part serpents, dragging their siimy forms over sand and rocks-Mermaids and Mermen, with human snouts and fishes' tails, frolicking among the waves or gliding through the streams-But it is not in the power of imagination to portray or conceive the confusion and monstrosities, the discords and deformities that would fill a world peopled by chance, fortuity or accident, as contemplated by the wild theory of Development.

to believe that mechanisms the most complicated and ingenious in their construction, and the most efficient and important in their use, that the human mind ever contemplated, are the results of mere haphazard variations, or blind chance, or sheer accident.

The denial of final causes is the distinguishing characteristic of Mr. Darwin's Theory. He denies design in any of the organisms in the animal and in the vegetable kingdom, and teaches that even the most complicated and marvellous of them all have been formed without any object or end in view, but turned out what they are by the gradual accumulation of unintended and undirected variations of structure and instinct. This is Darwinism presented pure and simple and naked. As it may seem to some incredible that any intelligent man should seriously hold and teach such a doctrine, it becomes necessary to give proof that this is his theory. This we now offer.

First, Proof from his own writings. This idea pervades his works throughout. "Slight individual differences," he says, "suffice for the work, and are probably the sole differences which are effective in the production of new species."* The same sentiment is repeated in his later work on Man: "Slight fluctuating differences in the individual suffice for the work of Natural Selection."+ Again: "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organism existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my

* Animals and Plants under Domestication, Vol. II.. p. 192. † Descent of Man, Vol. II., p. 370.