each day upon the accuracy of the ship's chronometer or on that of the watch of the railway engineer. The Duke of Argyll tells us ("Reign of Law" p. 35) the method of creation by means of which the purpose of the serpent's poison is carried into effect, is utterly unknown. "Take one instance out of a million. The poison of a deadly snake - let us for a moment consider what this is. It is a secretion of definite chemical properties which have reference, not only not even mainly to the organism of the animal in which it is developed, but specially to the organism of another animal which it is intended to destroy. Some naturalists have a vague notion that, as regards merely mechanical weapons or organs of attack, they may be developed by use, - that legs may become longer by fast running, teeth sharper and longer by much biting. Be it so; this law of growth, if it exist, is but itself an instrument whereby purpose is fulfilled. But how will this law of growth adjust a poison in one animal with such subtle knowledge of the organization of another that the deadly virus shall in a few minutes curdle the blood, benumb the limbs, and rush in upon the citadel of life? There is but one explanation, -a Mind having minute and perfect knowledge of the organization of both, has designed the one to be capable of inflicting death upon the other. The mode of secretion by which this purpose is carried into effect is utterly unknown." Belief that this adjustment, and others like it, have been produced by the inheritance of the effects of use, is, as the Duke of Argyll points out, a notion too vague to have any value; but since natural selection is discovered, no one can assert that there is no scientific explanation; for the snake which has power to destroy its enemies has such an advantage in the struggle for existence. that its survival is no harder to understand than any other natural phenomenon. The question that faces the modern teleologist is not whether the contrivances of man and the adjustments of living nature are useful, for this all must admit; but whether the snare of the fowler gives any clearer or any different evidence of contrivance than that given by the bird in whose sight it is spread in vain. If we give a negative answer to questions like this, it is clear that belief that the works of nature prove design by their resemblance to human contrivances has indeed received its death-blow; not because Paley's analogy breaks down, but because it becomes impregnable. Natural selection forces us to reconsider the argument from the analogy of human contrivances, not because it shows that the eye and the cat and the hinge of the bivalve shell have come about in order of nature; but because it gives to human contrivances a significance of which Paley never dreamed, and because it forces us to ask whether the hunter who contrives a net furnishes any different basis for analogy with the works of nature than the fish that contrives to get the bait without danger, or the spider and the sundew which also spread their snares, or the hydroid with its net of poisoned tentacles, or the radiolarian with its web of protoplasm. LECTURE XI PALEY, AND THE ARGUMENT FROM CONTRIVANCE PALEY sometimes argues that it is because watches are made by men that they prove design; while in other places, he holds that it because they are so put together as to point out the hours of the day. We must therefore ask what bearing natural selection has on this statement of his argument: (1) Living things, and their works, such as watches, exhibit peculiar evidence of usefulness. (2) Evidence of usefulness is evidence of design. (3) Living things and their works exhibit peculiar evidence of design. If it is true that watches come about in order of nature, and are so joined, by natural causation, to the movements of the earth that no one who knows all the data would have the least reason to expect that men should not make and sell and buy and use them, this may well raise a doubt whether the contrivance of man is any interruption to the order of nature; but a moment's thought shows that it by no means does away with the teleological problem, or makes it any easier to solve; for it is still as true as ever it was that watches do not come about without human makers, and that they are useful to mankind and help to preserve the human species from destruction. If the structure and orderly history of such things as eyes, and cats, and spiders' webs, and watches were all we discover in them, we might say these things are no harder to understand than inorganic bodies and their movements; for if living things are continually bringing about rearrangements of inorganic matter and physical energy, like watches, which never come about with |