of gravity, but they could by no means obtain the regular situation of these orbs by those laws at first," he argues that the design manifested in our solar system "could not have its origin from anything else than from the wise conduct and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being;" that this being is the supreme Lord God; that he must have dominion or he could not be the supreme Lord God; "The supreme God is an eternal, infinite, absolutely perfect being, but a being, how perfect soever, without dominion, is not Lord God."

The admission of design in the universe thus compelling the admission of a wise designer, we need not be surprised to find those who would eliminate the idea of a Creator, doing all they can to eliminate also the evidence of design. Newton asks, Was the eye contrived without skill in optics?" Mr. Darwin asserts that his law of "natural selection" shows how the eye was contrived without skill in optics. He makes this the crucial instance by which he tests the soundness of his hypothesis. He admits that if the eye required a contriver skilled in the laws of optics, his theory must fall to the ground; and therefore he uses all his dialectic skill in urging a proposition which seems, he admits on the very face of it, to "be absurd in the highest possible degree," and that "the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection" is insuperable even by our imagination.

Dr. Büchner, who denies the existence of any design throughout the whole domain of nature, hails this answer of Darwin to Newton's query with delight. Now, let us listen patiently to him whom his followers hail as the Newton of the organic world, and see how his law of natural selection is to construct an eye without skill in optics!

"To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed. by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, can never be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if, further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case;

and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that nerves sensitive to touch may be made sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound. In looking for the gradations by which an organ in any species has been perfected, we ought to look exclusively to its lineal ancestors; but this is scarcely ever possible, and we are forced in each case to look to species of the same group, that is to the collateral descendants from the same original parent form, in order to see what gradations are possible, and for the chance of some gradations having been transmitted from the earlier stages of descent, in an unaltered or little altered condition. Amongst existent vertebrata, we find but a small amount of gradation in the structure of the eye; though in the fish amphioxus the eye is an extremely simple condition without a lens; and from fossil species we can learn nothing on this head. In this great class we should probably have to descend far beneath the lowest known fossiliferous stratum to discover the earlier stages by which the eye has been perfected.

"In the great kingdom of the articulata we can start from an optic nerve, simply coated with pigment, which sometimes forms a sort of pupil, but is destitute of a lens or any other optical mechanism. From this rudimentary eye, which can distinguish light from darkness, but nothing else, there is an advance towards perfection along two lines of structure, which Müller thought were fundamentally different; namely,-firstly, stemmata, or the so-called 'simple eyes,' which have a lens and cornea; and secondly, 'compound eyes,' which seem to act mainly by excluding all the rays from each point of the object viewed; except the pencil that comes in a line perpendicular to the convex retina. In compound eyes besides endless differences in the form, proportion, number, and position of the transparent cones coated by pigment, and which act by exclusion, we have additions of a more or less perfect concentrating apparatus. Thus in the eye of the meloe the facets of the cornea are slightly convex, both externally and internally, that is, lens-shaped.' In many crustaceans there are two cornea,-the external smooth, and the internal divided into facets-within the substance of which, as Milne Edwards. says, 'renflemens lenticulaires paraissent s'être développés ;'

and sometimes these lenses can be detached in a layer distinct from the cornea. The transparent cones coated with pigment, which were supposed by Müller to act solely by excluding divergent pencils of light, usually adhere to the cornea, but not rarely they are separate from it, and have their free ends convex; and in this case they must act as converging lenses. Altogether so diversified is the structure of the compound eyes, that Müller makes three main classes, with no less than seven subdivisions of structure; he makes a fourth main class, namely, aggregates' of stemmata; and he adds that this is the transition-form between the mosaic-like compound eyes unprovided with a concentrating apparatus, and the organs of vision with such an apparatus.'.

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"With these facts, here too briefly and imperfectly given, which show how much graduated diversity there is in the eyes of our existing crustaceans, and bearing in mind how small the number of living animals is in proportion to those which have become extinct, I can see no very great difficulty (not more than in the case of many other structures) in believing that natural selection has converted the simple apparatus of an optic nerve merely coated with pigment and invested by transparent membrane, into an optical instrument as perfect as is possessed by any member of the great articulate class.

"He who will go thus far, if he find on finishing this treatise that large bodies of facts, otherwise inexplicable, can be explained by the theory of descent, ought not to hesitate to go further, and to admit that a structure even as perfect as the eye of an eagle might be formed by natural selection, although in his case he does not know any of the transitional grades. His reason ought to conquer his imagination; though I have felt the difficulty far too keenly to be surprised at any degree of hesitation in extending the principle of natural selection to such startling lengths.

"It is scarcely possible to avoid comparing the eye to a telescope. We know that this instrument has been perfected by the long-continued efforts of the highest human intellects; and we naturally infer that the eye has been formed by a somewhat analogous process. But may not this inference be presumptuous? Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man? If we must compare the eye to an optical instrument, we ought in imagination to take a thick layer of transparent tissue, with spaces filled with fluid, and with a nerve sensitive to light beneath, and then suppose every part of this layer to be continually changing slowly in density, so as to separate into layers of different densities and thicknesses, placed at different distances from

each other, and with the surfaces of each layer slowly changing in form. Further, we must suppose that there is a power (natural selection) always intently watching each slight accidental alteration in the transparent layers; and carefully selecting each alteration which, under varied circumstances, may in any way or in any degree tend to produce a distincter image. We must suppose each new state of the instrument to be multiplied by the million, and each to be preserved till a better be produced, and then the old ones to be destroyed. In living bodies, variation will cause the slight alteration, generation will multiply them almost infinitely, and natural selection will pick out with unerring skill each improvement. Let this process go on for millions on millions of years, and during each year on millions of individuals of many kinds; and may we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass, as the works of the Creator are to those of man?

"If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case. No doubt, many organs exist of which we do not know the transitional grades, more especially if we look to much-isolated species, round which, according to my theory, there has been much extinction; or, again, if we look to an organ common to all the members of a large class, for in this latter case the organ must have been first formed at an extremely remote period, since which all the many members of the class have been developed,—and in order to discover the early transitional grades through which the organ has passed, we should have to look to very ancient ancestral forms, long since become extinct."

Now, after carefully studying Mr. Darwin's own arguments for the formation of the eye without skill in optics, I must confess that they fail to convince me in the slightest degree. They are founded on monstrous assumptions utterly unsupported by fact. They assume that any variation, however slight, of any animal organ can be transmitted by inheritance. That there are no natural limits whatever to this transmission; while all experience and all our knowledge go to prove that there are limits that cannot be passed. That the tendency. even of those deviations produced by man's art in the animal and vegetable world, as admitted by Darwin himself, is ever to revert to the type from whence they proceeded rather than to diverge ad infinitum. That this law of natural selection does by no means account for myriads of facts in nature directly opposed to it. "Take," says Sir John Herschel,

"for an instance, the formative nisus, which determines the production of a supernumerary finger in the human hand. Here is no gradual change from generation to generation; no first development of a rudimentary joint followed in slow succession after centuries of hereditary improvement, by the others, up to the perfect member: it starts at once into completeness. The change in the working-plan of the whole hand has been carried out at once, by a systematic engraftment of blood-vessels and nerves into effective connections with the centres of nutritive, mechanical, and sensitive action in the frame, as if by some preconceived arrangement." Again: Mr. Darwin's millions of millions of imperfect microscopes and telescopes, ascending by slow and imperceptible stages from the accidentally exposed nerve of some primeval animal, exist nowhere in fact, but only in his own fertile imagination. He points out eyes among the radiata he calls imperfect. Are they really so? We judge the perfection of an organ not so much by its mechanical structure as its adaptation to the wants of its possessor. For some creatures the simplest form of an organ may be better adapted than the most complicated. Again: if I regard the law of natural selection of accidental varieties propagated by inheritance from an individual as a mathematician; if I regard that law as the producer of so complicated an organ as the eye, with its innumerable contrivances to effect its object, the laws of probability compel me at once to reject such a proposition as monstrous, from its inherent improbability. And this, too, assuming as proved that which so many facts contradict, that any accidental variety can be propagated by inheritance without any limitation.

How is it, we may ask again, that this law of natural selection has been so bountiful as to supply some individuals with almost countless myriads of eyes, and so great a number with only two? How are we to account for this without the intervention of some other law, regulated and fixed by design? But let us view the formation of the eye by this law of natural selection from another aspect. How does it account for the formation of any single existing eye we may select as an example. I know, for instance, that each of my eyes has been elaborated from one fluid-from blood. There was a time when my eyes had no existence. Have they passed through millions of millions of imperfect instruments, correcting their imperfections by the stern law of natural selection upon penalty of loss of existence? No. The marvellous lenses, constructed so as to defy their imitation by human skill, have been formed, without trial and error, on the strictest principles of mathematical