In the winter and early spring he gave his usual lectures at South Kensington; a course to working men “On the Evidence as to the Origin of Existing Vertebrated Animals,” from February to April ("Nature” volumes 13 and 14); a lecture at the Royal Institution (January 28) “On the Border Territory between the Animal and Vegetable Kingdoms” ("Collected Essays” 8 170); and another at Glasgow (February 15) “On the Teleology and Morphology of the Hand.”

In this lecture, which he never found time to get into final shape for publication, but which was substantially repeated at the Working Men’s College in 1878, he touched upon one of the philosophic aspects of the theory of evolution, namely, how far is it consistent with the argument from design?

Granting provisionally the force of Paley’s argument in individual cases of adaptation, and illustrating it by the hand and its representative in various of the Mammalia, he proceeds to show by the facts of morphology that the argument, as commonly stated, fails; that each mechanism, each animal, was not specially made to suit the particular purpose we find it serving, but was developed from a single common type.  Yet in a limited and special sense he finds teleology to be not inconsistent with morphology.  The two sets of facts flow from a common cause, evolution.  Descent by modification accounts for similarity of structure; the process of gradual adaptation to conditions accounts for the existing adaptation to purpose.  To be a teleologist and yet accept evolution it is only necessary] “to suppose that the original plan was sketched out—­that the purpose was foreshadowed in the molecular arrangements out of which the animals have come.”

[This was no new view of his.  While, ever since his first review of the “Origin” in 1859 ("Collected Essays” 2 6), he had declared the commoner and coarser forms of teleology to find their most formidable opponent in the theory of evolution, and in 1869, addressing the Geological Society, had spoken of] “those final causes, which have been named barren virgins, but which might be more fitly termed the hetairae of philosophy, so constantly have they led men astray” [(ib. 8 80; cp. 2 21, 36), he had, in his “Criticism of the Origin” (1864 2 86), and the “Genealogy of Animals” (1869 2 109 sqq.), shown how] “perhaps the most remarkable service to the philosophy of Biology rendered by Mr. Darwin is the reconciliation of teleology and morphology, and the explanation of the facts of both which his views offer...the wider teleology, which is actually based upon the fundamental proposition of evolution.”

[His notebook shows that he was busy with Reptilia from Elgin and from India; and with his “Manual of Invertebrate Anatomy,” which was published the next year; while he refused to undertake a course of ten lectures at the Royal Institution, saying that he had already too much other work to do, and would have no time for original work.