But it is clear to us that this monopoly is shared with certain beings of inferior grade.  Granting that quite possibly the capture of flies for food by Dionaea and the sundews may be attributed to purpose apart from design (if it be practicable in the last resort to maintain this now convenient distinction), still their capture by a spider’s-web, and by a swallow on the wing, can hardly “cease to suggest design to instructed people.”  And surely, in coming at his master’s call, the dog fulfills his own design as well as that of his master; and so of other actions and constructions of brute animals.

Without doubt so acute a writer has a clear and sensible meaning; so we conclude that he regards brutes as automata, and was thinking of design as coextensive merely with general conceptions.  Not concerning ourselves with the difficulty he may have in drawing a line between the simpler judgments and affections of man and those of the highest-endowed brutes, we subserve our immediate ends by remarking that the automatic theory would seem to be one which can least of all dispense with design, since, either in the literal or current sense of the word, undesigned automatism is, as near as may be, a contradiction in terms.  As the automaton man constructs manifests the designs of its maker and mover, so the more efficient automata which man did not construct would not legitimately suggest less than human intelligence.  And so all adaptations in the animal and vegetable world which irresistibly suggest purpose (in the sense now accepted) would also suggest design, and, under the law of parsimony, claim to be thus interpreted, unless some other hypothesis will better account for the facts.  We will consider, presently, if any other does so.

We here claim only that some beings other than men design, and that the adaptations of means to ends in the structure of animals and plants, in so far as they carry the marks of purpose, carry also the implication of having been designed.  Also, that the idea or hypothesis of a designing mind, as the author of Nature—­however we came by it—­having possession of the field, and being one which man, himself a designer, seemingly must needs form, cannot be rivaled except by some other equally adequate for explanation, or displaced except by showing the illegitimacy of the inference.  As to the latter, is the common apprehension and sense of mankind in this regard well grounded?  Can we rightly reason from our own intelligence and powers to a higher or a supreme intelligence ordering and shaping the system of Nature?

A very able and ingenious writer upon “The Evidences of Design in Nature,” in the Westminster Review for July, 1875, maintains the negative.  His article may be taken as the argument in support of the position assumed by “P.C.W.,” in the Contemporary Review above cited.  It opens with the admission that the orthodox view is the most simple and apparently convincing, has had for centuries the unhesitating