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Show 82 .D.AR WINI.AN .A. curious appendages, and, a thousand times more wonderful still, without being encumbered with a single superfluous or useless part,. can he say that this could be the work of chance~ The improbability of this is so great, and consequently the evidence of design is so strong, that he is about to seal his verdict in favor of design, when he opens Mr. Darwin's book. There he :finds that an eye is no more than a vital aggregation or growth, directed, not by design nor chance, but moulded by natural variation and natural selection, through which it must, necessarily, have been developed and formed. Particles or atoms being aggregated by the blind powers of life, must become under the given conditions, by natural variation and natural selection, eyes, without design, as certainly as the red billiard-ball went to the west pocket, by the powers of inertia and elasticity, without the design of the hand that put it in motion. (See Darwin, p.169.) Let us lay before our s~eptic the way in which we may suppose that Darwin would trace the operation of life, or the vital force conforming to these laws. In doing this we need not go through with the formation of the several membranes, humors, etc., but take the crystalline lens as the most curious and nicely arranged and adapted of all the parts, and as giving, moreover, a close parallel, in the end produced, to that produced by design, by a human designer, Dollond, in forming his achromatic object-glass. If it can be shown that natural variation and natural selection were capable of forming the crystalline lens, it will not be denied that they were capable of forming the iris, the sclerotica, the aqueous humors, or any and all .DESIGN VERSUS NECESSITY. 83 the other parts. Suppose, then, that we have anumber of animals, with eyes yet wanting the crystalline. In this state the animals can see, but dimly and imperfectly, as a man sees after having been couched. Some of the offspring of these animals have, by natV/ ral variation, merely a portion of the membrane which separates the aqueous from the vitreous. humor a little thickened in its middle part, a little swelled out. This refracts the light a little more than it would be refracted by a membrane ii}. which no such swelling .existed, and not only so, but; in combination with the humors, it corrects the errors of dispersion and makes the image somewhat more colorless. All the young animals that have this swelled membrane see more distinctly than their parents or brethren. They, therefore, have an advantage over them in the struggle for life. They can obtain food more easily; can :find their prey, and escape from their enemies with greater facility than their kindred. This thickening and rounding of the membrane goes on from generation to generation by natural variation; natural selection all the while "picking out with unerring skill all the improvements, through countless generations," until at length it is found that the membrane has become a perfect crystalline lens. Now, where is the design in all this~ The membrane was not thickened and rounded to the end that the image should be more distinct and colorless; but, being thickened and rounded by the operation of natural variation, inherent in generation, natural selection qf necessity produced the result that we have seen. The same result was thus produced qf necessity, in the eye, that Dollond came at, |