It was reserved for Mr. Charles Darwin and for those who have too rashly
followed him to deny purpose as having had any share in the development
of animal and vegetable organs; to see no evidence of design in those
wonderful provisions which have been the marvel and delight of observers
in all ages. The one who has drawn our attention more than perhaps any
other living writer to those very marvels of co-adaptation, is the
foremost to maintain that they are the result not of desire and design,
either within the creature or without it, but of blind chance, working no
whither, and due but to the accumulation of innumerable lucky accidents.
"There are men," writes Professor Tyndal in the _Nineteenth Century_ for
last November, {144} "and by no means the minority, who, however wealthy
in regard to facts, can never rise into the region of principles; and
they are sometimes intolerant of those that can. They are formed to plod
meritoriously on in the lower levels of thought; unpossessed of the
pinions necessary to reach the heights, they cannot realise the mental
act--the act of inspiration it might well be called--by which a man of
genius, after long pondering and proving, reaches a theoretic conception
which unravels and illuminates the tangle of centuries of observation and
experiment. There are minds, it may be said in passing, who, at the
present moment, stand in this relation to Mr.
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