of the very same sort, though simpler, and better adapted to illustrate natural selection; because the change of direction—­your necessity—­acts gradually or successively, instead of abruptly.  Suppose I hit a man standing obliquely in my rear, by throwing forward a crooked stick, called a boomerang.  How could he know whether the blow was intentional or not?  But suppose I had been known to throw boomerangs before; suppose that, on different occasions, I had before wounded persons by the same, or other indirect and apparently aimless actions; and suppose that an object appeared to be gained in the result—­that definite ends were attained—­would it not at length be inferred that my assault, though indirect, or apparently indirect, was designed?

To make the case more nearly parallel with those it is brought to illustrate, you have only to suppose that, although the boomerang thrown by me went forward to a definite place, and at least appeared to subserve a purpose, and the bystanders, after a while, could get traces of the mode or the empirical law of its flight, yet they could not themselves do anything with it.  It was quite beyond their power to use it.  Would they doubt, or deny my intention, on that account?  No:  they would insist that design on my part must be presumed from the nature of the results; that, though design may have been wanting in any one case, yet the repetition of the result, and from different positions and under varied circumstances, showed that there must have been design.

Moreover, in the way your case is stated, it seems to concede the most important half of the question, and so affords a presumption for the rest, on the side of design.  For you seem to assume an actor, a designer, accomplishing his design in the first instance.  You—­a bystander—­infer that the player effected his design in sending the first ball to the pocket before him.  You infer this from observation alone.  Must you not from a continuance of the same observation equally infer a common design of the two players in the complex result, or a design of one of them to frustrate the design of the other?  If you grant a designing actor, the presumption of design is as strong, or upon continued observation of instances soon becomes as strong, in regard to the deflection of the balls, or variation of the species, as it was for the result of the first impulse or for the production of the original animal, etc.

But, in the case to be illustrated, we do not see the player.  We see only the movement of the balls.  Now, if the contrivances and adaptations referred to really do “prove a designer as much as the palace or the watch proves an architect or a watchmaker”—­as Paley and Bell argue, and as your skeptic admits, while the alternative is between design and chance—­then they prove it with all the proof the case is susceptible of, and with complete conviction.  For we cannot doubt that the watch had a watchmaker.  And if