consequences meet and fit into each other in endless circles of Harmony and of Purpose. And this can only be explained by the fact that what we call Natural Consequence is always the conjoint effect of an infinite number of elementary Forces, whose action and reaction are under direction of the Will which we see obeyed, and of the Purposes which we see actually attained." 1 12. The relation which an organic structure bears to its purpose in Nature is not less capable of certain recognition than the same relation between a machine and its purpose in human art. "It is absurd to maintain, for example, that the purpose of the cellular arrangement of material in combining lightness with strength, is a purpose legitimately cognisable by Science in the Menai Bridge, but is not as legitimately cognisable when it is seen in Nature, actually serving the same use. The little Barnacles which crust the rocks at low tide, and which to live there at all must be able to resist the surf, have the building of their shells constructed strictly with reference to this necessity. It is a structure all hollowed and chambered on the plan which engineers have so lately discovered as an arrangement of material by which the power of resisting strain or pressure is multiplied in an extraordinary degree. That shell 1 The Duke of Argyll's "Reign of Law" (Sixth Edition), pp. 124 et seq. is as pure a bit of mechanics as the bridge; both being structures in which the same arrangement is adapted to the same end.”1 66 Small, but a work divine; Of cataract seas that snap The three-decker's oaken spine." 2 This is but one instance out of a number that no man can count. The Electric Ray, or Torpedo, has been provided with a Battery which, while it closely resembles, yet in the beauty and compactness of its structure, it greatly exceeds the Batteries by which Man has now learned to make the laws of Electricity subservient to his will. In this Battery there are no less than 940 hexagonal columns, like those of a bees' comb, and each of these is subdivided by a series of horizontal plates, which appear to be analogous to the plates of the Voltaic Pile. The whole is supplied with an enormous amount of nervous matter, four great branches of which are as large as the animal's spinal cord, and these spread out in a multitude of thread-like filaments round the prismatic columns, and finally pass into all 1 "The Reign of Law," pp. 99, 100. T the cells. 1 "A complete knowledge of all the mysteries which have been gradually unfolded from the days of Galvani to those of Faraday, and of many others which are still inscrutable to is exhibited in this structure." Well may Mr. Darwin say, "It is impossible to conceive by what steps these wondrous organs have been produced." 2 "We see the Purpose-that a special apparatus should be prepared, and we see that it is effected by the production of the machine required: but we have not the remotest notion of the means employed. Yet we can see so much as this, that here again, other laws, belonging altogether to another department of Nature-laws of organic growth—are made subservient to a very definite and very peculiar Purpose." The laws appealed to in the accomplishment of this purpose are at once numerous and highly complicated. They are so because the conditions to be satisfied refer not merely to the generation of Electric force in the animal to which it is given, but to its effect on the nervous system of the animals against which it is to be employed, and also to the conducting medium in which 1 Prof. Owen's "Lectures on Comparative Anatomy," vol. ii. (Fishes). 2 "Origin of Species." First Edition, p. 192. both are moving. But the fact that these conditions exist, and must be satisfied, is not the ultimate fact, it is not even the main fact which Science apprehends in such phenomena as these. That which is most observable and most certain, is the manner in which these conditions are met. But this, in other words, is simply the subordination of many laws to a difficult and curious Purpose; a Purpose none the less obvious, and a subordination not the less remarkable, because effected through the instrumentality of mechanical contrivance. "The new-born Kangaroo," says Professor Owen, "is an inch in length, naked, blind, with very rudimental limbs and tail: in one which I examined the morning after the birth, I could discern no act of sucking: it hung, like a germ, from the end of the long nipple, and seemed unable to draw sustenance therefrom by its own efforts. The mother accordingly is provided with a peculiar adaptation of a muscle (cremaster) to the mammary gland, by which she can inject the milk from the nipple into the mouth of the pendulous embryo. Were the larynx of the little creature like that of the parent, the milk might, probably would, enter the windpipe and cause suffocation: but the fœtal larynx is cone-shaped, with the opening at the apex, which projects, as in the whale-tribe, into the back aperture of the nostrils, where it is closely embraced by the muscles of the 'soft palate.' The air-passage is thus completely separated from the fauces, and the injected milk passes in a divided stream, on either side the base of the larynx, into the œsophagus. These correlated modifications of maternal and foetal structures, designed with especial reference to the peculiar conditions of both mother and offspring, afford, as it seems to me, irrefragable evidence of Creative foresight." 1 "The parts of this apparatus cannot have produced one another; one part is in the mother, another part in the young one; without their harmony they could not be effective; but nothing except design can operate to make them harmonious. They are intended to work together; and we cannot resist the conviction of this intention when the facts first come before us." 2 13. "A prospect-glass or a forceps is an instrument; they have each a final cause; that is, they were each made and adjusted for a certain use. The use of the prospect-glass is to assist the eye; the use of the forceps is to assist the hand. The prospect-glass was made the better to see; the forceps, the better to grasp. The use did not make these instruments; they were each made for the use-which use was foreseen and premeditated in the mind of the maker of them. We say of each of them without a shadow of hesitation: IF THIS HAD NOT FIRST BEEN A THOUGHT, IT COULD NEVER HAVE BEEN A THING. Now, is the Eye or the Hand an instrument adjusted to a certain use, and thus revealing an antecedent purpose in 1 Philosophical Transactions, 1834, Reade Lecture, p 29. 2 Phil. Inductive Sciences, vol. i. p. 625. |