species what he before took to be so many varieties of one species, how has he thereby strengthened our conviction that the three forms were designed to have the differences which they actually exhibit?  Wherefore, so long as gradated, orderly, and adapted forms in Nature argue design, and at least while the physical cause of variation is utterly unknown and mysterious, we should advise Mr. Darwin to assume, in the philosophy of his hypothesis, that variation has been led along certain beneficial lines.  Streams flowing over a sloping plain by gravitation (here the counterpart of natural selection) may have worn their actual channels as they flowed; yet their particular courses may have been assigned; and where we see them forming definite and useful lines of irrigation, after a manner unaccountable on the laws of gravitation and dynamics, we should believe that the distribution was designed.

To insist, therefore, that the new hypothesis of the derivative origin of the actual species is incompatible with final causes and design is to take a position which we must consider philosophically untenable.  We must also regard it as unwise or dangerous, in the present state and present prospects of physical and physiological science.  We should expect the philosophical atheist or skeptic to take this ground; also, until better informed, the unlearned and unphilosophical believer; but we should think that the thoughtful theistic philosopher would take the other side.  Not to do so seems to concede that only supernatural events can be shown to be designed, which no theist can admit,—­seems also to misconceive the scope and meaning of all ordinary arguments for design in Nature.  This misconception is shared both by the reviewers and the reviewed.  At least, Mr. Darwin uses expressions which seem to imply that the natural forms which surround us, because they have a history or natural sequence, could have been only generally, but not particularly designed,—­a view at once superficial and contradictory; whereas his true line should be, that his hypothesis concerns the order and not the cause, the how and not the why of the phenomena, and so leaves the question of design just where it was before.

To illustrate this first from the theist’s point of view.  Transfer the question for a moment from the origination of species to the origination of individuals, which occurs, as we say, naturally.  Because natural, that is, “stated, fixed, or settled,” is it any the less designed on that account?  We acknowledge that God is our maker,—­not merely the originator of the race, but our maker as individuals,—­and none the less so because it pleased Him to make us in the way of ordinary generation.  If any of us were born unlike our parents and grandparents, in a slight degree, or in whatever degree, would the case be altered in this regard?  The whole argument in natural theology proceeds upon the ground that the inference for a final cause of the structure of