ves Professor Haeckel has adopted.
He holds that those who accept evolution are bound to reject all
"purposiveness." And here, as I have intimated, I differ from him, for
reasons which will appear presently. I believe in an organic and
tangible designer of every complex structure, for so long a time past,
as that reasonable people will be incurious about all that occurred at
any earlier time.

Professor Clifford, again, is a fair representative of opinions which
are finding favour with the majority of our own thinkers. He writes:--

"There are here some words, however, which require careful definition.
And first the word purpose. A thing serves a purpose when it is adapted
for some end; thus a corkscrew is adapted to the end of extracting corks
from bottles, and our lungs are adapted to the end of respiration. We
may say that the extraction of corks is the purpose of the corkscrew,
and that respiration is the purpose of the lungs, but here we shall have
used the word in two different senses. A man made the corkscrew with a
purpose in his mind, and he knew and intended that it should be used for
pulling out corks. _But nobody made our lungs with a purpose in his mind
and intended that they should be used for breathing._ The respiratory
apparatus was adapted to its purpose by natural selection, namely, by
the gradual preservation of better and better adaptations, and by the
killing-off of the worse and imperfect adaptations."[6]

No denial of anything like design could be more explicit. For Professor
Clifford is well aware that the very essence of the "Natural Selection"
theory, is that the variations shall have been mainly accidental and
without design of any sort, but that the adaptations of structure to
need shall have come about by the accumulation, through natural
selection, of any variation that _happened_ to be favourable.

It will be my business on a later page not only to show that the lungs
are as purposive as the corkscrew, but furthermore that if drawing corks
had been a matter of as much importance to us as breathing is, the list
of our organs would have been found to comprise one corkscrew at the
least, and possibly two, twenty, or ten thousand; even as we see that
the trowel without which the beaver cannot plaster its habitation in
such fashion as alone satisfies it, is incorporate into the beaver's own
body by way of a tail, the like of which is to be found in no other
animal.

To take a name which ca