neither of these was designed-and the animal would have gone on without eyes. The balls would have found the corners of the table to which they were first directed.

While, therefore, it seems to mo clear that one who can find no proof of the existence of an intelligent Creator except through the ovidence of design in the organic world, can find no evidence of such design in the construction of the eye, if it were constructed under the operation of Darwin's laws, I shall not for one moment contend that these laws are incompatible with design and a self-conscious, intelligent Creator. Such design might, indeed, have coexisted with the necessity or natural selection; and so the billiard-players might have designed the collision of their balls; but neither the formation of the eye, nor the path of the balls after collision, furnishes any suflicient proof of such design in either case.

One, indeed, who believes, from revelation or any other cause, in the existence of such a Creator, the fountain and source of all things in heaven above and in the earth beneath, will see in natural variation, the strug gle for life, and natural selection, only the order or modo in which this Creator, in his own perfect wis dom, sees fit to act. Happy is he who can thus sco and adoro. But how many aro thero who havo no such belief from intuition, or faith in revelation; but who have by careful and elaborate search in the phys ical, and more especially in the organic world, inferred, by induction, the existence of God from what has seemed to them the wonderful adaptation of the different organs and parts of the animal body to its,

apparently, designed ends! Imagine a mind of this skeptical character, in all honesty and under its best reason, after finding itself obliged to reject tho ovidence of revelation, to commenco a search after tho Creator, in the light of natural theology. He goes through the proof for final cause and design, as given in a summary though clear, plain, and convincing form, in the pages of Paley and the "Bridgewater Treatises." The eye and the hand, those perfect instruments of optical and mechanical contrivance and adaptation, without the least wasto or surplusage-these, say Paley and Bell, certainly prove a designing maker as much as the palace or the watch proves an architect or a watchmaker. Let this mind, in this state, cross Darwin's work, and find that, after a sensitive nerve or a rudimentary hoof or claw, no design is to be found. From this point upward the development is the mero necessary result of natural selection; and let him receive this law of natural selection as truc, and whero does he find himself? Before, he could refer tho existence of the eye, for example, only to design, or chance. There was no other alternative. He rejected chance, as impossible. It must then be a design. But Darwin brings up another power, namely, natural selection, in place of this impossible chance. This not only may, but, according to Darwin, must of necessity produce an eye. It may indeed coexist with design, but it must exist and act and produce its results, oven without design. Will such a mind, under such circumstances, infer the existence of the designer-Godwhen he can, at the same time, satisfactorily account for the thing produced, by the operation of this natural so

.ection? It sooms to me, therefore, perfectly evident that the substitution of natural selection, by necessity, for design in the formation of the organic world, is a step decidedly atheistical. It is in vain to say that Darwin takes the creation of organic life, in its simplest forms, to have been the work of the Deity. In giving up design in these highest and most complex forms of organization, which have always been relied upon as the crowning proof of the existence of an intelligent Creator, without whose intellectual power they could not have been brought into being, he takes a most decided step to banish a belief in the intelligent action of God from the organic world. The lower organisms will go next.

The atheist will say, Wait a little. Some future Darwin will show how the simple forms came necessarily from inorganic matter. This is but another step by which, according to Laplace, "the discoveries of science throw final causes further back."

A. G.-It is conceded that, if the two players in the supposed case were ignorant of each other's presence, the designs of both were frustrated, and from necessity. Thus far it is not needful to inquire wheth or this necessary consequence is an unconditional or a conditioned necessity, nor to require a more definite statement of the meaning attached to the word necesaity as a supposed third alternative.

But, if the players knew of each other's presence, we could not infer from the result that the design of both or of either was frustrated. One of them may have intended to frustrate the otlier's design, and to

effect his own. Or both may have been equally conversant with the properties of the matter and the relation of the forces concerned (whatever the cause, origin, or nature, of these forces and properties), and the result may have been according to the designs of both.

As you admit that they might or might not have designed the collision of their balls and its conscquences, the question arises whether there is any way of ascertaining which of the two conceptions we may form about it is the true one. Now, let it be romarked that design can never be demonstrated. Witnessing the act does not make known the design, as wo have seen in the case assumed for the basis of the argument. The word of the actor is not proof; and that source of evidence is excluded from the cases in ques tion. The only way left, and the only possible way in cases where testimony is out of the question, is to infer the design from the result, or from arrangements which strike us as adapted or intended to produce a certain result, which affords a presumption of design. The strength of this presumption may be zero, or an even chance, as perhaps it is in the assumed case; but the probability of design will increase with the particu larity of the act, the specialty of the arrangement or machinery, and with the number of identical or yet more of similar and analogous instances, until it rises to a moral certainty-i. c., to a conviction which prac tically we are as unable to resist as we are to deny the cogency of a mathematical demonstration. A single instance, or set of instances, of a comparatively simplo arrangement might suffice. For instance, wo should

not doubt that a pump was designed to raise water by the moving of the handle. Of course, the conviction is the stronger, or at least the sooner arrived at, where we can imitate the arrangement, and ourselves produce the result at will, as we could with a pump, and also with the billiard-balls.

And here I would suggest that your billiard-table, with the case of collision, answers well to a machine. In both a result is produced by indirection-by applying a force out of line of the ultimate direction. And, as I should feel as confident that a man intended to raise water who was working a pump-handle, as if he were bringing it up in pailfuls from below by means of a ladder, so, after due examination of the billiardtable and its appurtenances, I should probably think it likely that the effect of the rebound was expected and intended no less than that of the immediate impulse. And a similar inspection of arrangements and results in Nature would raise at least an equal presumption of design.

You allow that the rebound might have been intended, but you require proof that it was. We agree that a single such instance affords no evidence either way. But how would it be if you saw the men doing the same thing over and over? and if they varied it by other arrangements of the balls or of the blow, and these were followed by analogous results? How if you at length discovered a profitable end of the opera tion, say the winning of a wager? So in the counterpart case of natural selection: must we not infer intention from the arrangements and the results? But I will take another case of the very same sort,