67

for constructing the first telescope.  Possibly, in time, say a few geological ages, it might in some optician’s shop have brought about a combination of flint and crown glass which, together, should have been achromatic.  But the space between the humors of the eye is not an optician’ s shop where object-glasses of all kinds, shapes, and sizes, are placed by chance, in all manner of relations and positions.  On the hypothesis under which our skeptic is making his examination—­the eye having been completed in all but the formation of the lens—­the place which the lens occupies when completed was filled with parts of the humors and plane membrane, homogeneous in texture and surface, presenting, therefore, neither the variety of the materials nor forms which are contained in the optician’s shop for chance to make its combinations with.  How, then, could it be cast of a combination not before used, and fashioned to a shape different from that before known, and placed in exact combination with all the parts before enumerated, with many others not even mentioned?  He sees no parallelism of condition, then, by which chance could act in forming a crystalline lens, which answers to the condition of an optician’s shop, where it might be possible in many ages for chance to combine existing forms into an achromatic object-glass.

Considering, therefore, the eye thus completed and placed in its bony case and provided with its muscles, its lids, its tear-ducts, and all its other elaborate and curious appendages, and, a thousand times more wonderful still, without being encumbered with a single superfluous or useless part, can he say that this could be the work of chance?  The improbability of this is so great, and consequently the evidence of design is so strong, that he is about to seal his verdict in favor of design, when he opens Mr. Darwin’s book.  There he finds that an eye is no more than a vital aggregation or growth, directed, not by design nor chance, but moulded by natural variation and natural selection, through which it must, necessarily, have been developed and formed.  Particles or atoms being aggregated by the blind powers of life, must become under the given conditions, by natural variation and natural selection, eyes, without design, as certainly as the red billiard-ball went to the west pocket, by the powers of inertia and elasticity, without the design of the hand that put it in motion. (See Darwin, p. 169.)

Let us lay before our skeptic the way in which we may suppose that Darwin would trace the operation of life, or the vital force conforming to these laws.  In doing this we need not go through with the formation of the several membranes, humors, etc., but take the crystalline lens as the most curious and nicely arranged and adapted of all the parts, and as giving, moreover, a close parallel, in the end produced, to that produced by design, by a human designer, Dollond, in forming his achromatic object-glass.  If it