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Show 36G DARWINIAN A. bility are drawn .... We cannot imagine ourselves in the position of the Creator before his work began, nor examine the materials among which he had to choose, nor count the laws which limited his operations. Her~ all is dark, and the inference we draw from the seeming perfections of the existing instruments or means is a measure of nothing but our ignorance." But the question is not about the perfection of these adaptations, or whether others might have been instituted in their place. It is simply whether observed adaptations of intricate sorts, admirably subserving uses, do or do not legitima.tely suggest to one designing mind th~t they are the product of some other. If so, no amount of ignorance, or even inconceivability, of the conditions and :r.pode of production could affect the validity of the inference, nor could it be affected by any misunderstanding on our part as to what the particular use· or function was; a statement which would have been deemed superfluous, except for the following : "There is not an organ in our bodies but w bat has passed, and is still passing, through a series of different and often contradictory interpretations. Our lungs, for instance, were anciently conceived to be a kind of cooling apparatus, a refrigerator ; at the close of the last century they were supposed to be a centre of combustion; and nowadays both these theories have been abandoned for a third ...• Have these changes modified in the slightest degree the supposed evidence of design~" We have not the least idea why they should. So, also, of complicated processes, such as human digestion, being replaced by other and simpler ones in lower animals, or even in certain plants. If "we EVOLUTIONARY TELEOLOGY. 367 argue the necessity of every adaptation solely from the fact that it exists," and that " we cannot mutilate it grossly without injury to the function," we do not :' announce triumphantly that digestion is impossible In any way but this," etc., but see equal wisdom and no imp~gnment of design in any number of simpler adaptatwns accomplishing equivalent purposes in lower animals. . Finally, a~apt~tion and utility being the only marks of design In Nature which we possess, and adaptation only as subservient to usefulness the Westminster Reviewer shows us how- ' " The argument from utility may be equally refuted another way. We found in our discussion of the mark of adaptation that the positive evidence of design afforded by the mechanis. n:s of the hu~an f~·ame was never accompanied by the possib: hty of negative evidence. We regarded this as a suspicious Clrcumstance, just as the fox, invited to attend the lion in his den, wa~ deterred from his visit by observing that all the foottracks lay in one direction. The same suspicious circumstance warns us now. If positive evidence of design be afforded by the presence of a faculty, negative evidence of design ought to be afforded by the absence of a faculty. This, however, is not the case." [Then follows the account of a butterfly, which, from the wonderful power of the males to find the females at a great distance, is conceived to possess a sixth sense.] "Do we consider the deficiency of this sixth sense in man as the slightest evidence against design~ Should we be less apt to infer creative wisdom if we had only four senses instead of five, or three instead of fond No, the case would stand precisely as it does now. We value our sensl)s simply because we have them, and because our conception of life as we desire it is drawn from them. But to reason from such value to the , origin of our endowment, to argue that our senses must have |