drawing from the position and times of revolution of the worlds so originated “direct evidence that the physical world has been ordained in conformity with laws which obtain also among living beings.”  But the reader of the interesting exposition [5] will notice that the designed result has been brought to pass through what, speaking after the manner of men, might be called a chapter of accidents.  A natural corollary of this demonstration would seem to be, that a material connection between a series of created things—­such as the development of one of them from another, or of all from a common stock—­is highly compatible with their intellectual connection, namely, with their being designed and directed by one mind.  Yet, upon some ground, which is not explained, and which we are unable to conjecture, Mr. Agassiz concludes to the contrary in the organic kingdoms, and insists, that, because the members of such a series have an intellectual connection, “they cannot be the result of a material differentiation of the objects themselves,"[6] that is, they cannot have had a genealogical connection.  But is there not as much intellectual connection between successive generations of any species as there is between the several species of a genus or the several genera of an order?  As the intellectual connection here is realized through the material connection, why may it not be so in the case of species and genera?  On all sides, therefore, the implication seems to be quite the other way.

Returning to the accidental element, it is evident that the strongest point against the compatibility of Darwin’s hypothesis with design in Nature is made when natural selection is referred to as picking out those variations which are improvements from a vast number which are not improvements, but perhaps the contrary, and therefore useless or purposeless, and born to perish.  But even here the difficulty is not peculiar; for Nature abounds with analogous instances.  Some of our race are useless, or worse, as regards the improvement of mankind; yet the race may be designed to improve, and may be actually improving.  The whole animate life of a country depends absolutely upon the vegetation; the vegetation upon the rain.  The moisture is furnished by the ocean, is raised by the sun’s heat from the ocean’s surface, and is wafted inland by the winds.  But what multitudes of rain-drops fall back into the ocean, are as much without a final cause as the incipient varieties which come to nothing!  Does it, therefore, follow that the rains which are bestowed upon the soil with such rule and average regularity were not designed to support vegetable and animal life?  Consider, likewise, the vast proportion of seeds and pollen, of ova and young,—­a thousand or more to one,—­which come to nothing, and are therefore purposeless in the same sense, and only in the same sense, as are Darwin’s unimproved and unused slight variations.  The world is full of such cases; and these must answer the argument,—­for we cannot, except by thus showing that it proves too much.