design of
the model, we turn naturally to the guidance of those who have made this
study their specialty; and a very wide difference does this study,
embryology, at once reveal to us.

Writing of the successive changes through which each embryo is forced to
pass, the late Mr. G. H. Lewes says that "none of these phases have any
adaptation to the future state of the animal, but are in positive
contradiction to it or are simply purposeless; whereas all show stamped
on them the unmistakable characters of _ancestral_ adaptation, and the
progressions of organic evolution. What does the fact imply? There is
not a single known example of a complex organism which is not developed
out of simpler forms. Before it can attain the complex structure which
distinguishes it, there must be an evolution of forms similar to those
which distinguish the structure of organisms lower in the series. On the
hypothesis of a plan which prearranged the organic world, nothing could
be more unworthy of a supreme intelligence than this inability to
construct an organism at once, without making several previous tentative
efforts, undoing to-day what was so carefully done yesterday, and
_repeating for centuries the same tentatives in the same succession_. Do
not let us blink this consideration. There is a traditional phrase much
in vogue among the anthropomorphists, which arose naturally enough from
a tendency to take human methods as an explanation of the Divine--a
phrase which becomes a sort of argument--'The Great Architect.' But if
we are to admit the human point of view, a glance at the facts of
embryology must produce very uncomfortable reflections. For what should
we say to an architect who was unable, or being able was obstinately
unwilling, to erect a palace except by first using his materials in the
shape of a hut, then pulling them down and rebuilding them as a cottage,
then adding story to story and room to room, _not_ with any reference to
the ultimate purposes of the palace, but wholly with reference to the
way in which houses were constructed in ancient times? What should we
say to the architect who could not form a museum out of bricks and
mortar, but was forced to begin as if going to construct a mansion, and
after proceeding some way in this direction, altered his plan into a
palace, and that again into a museum? Yet this is the sort of succession
on which organisms are constructed. The fact has long been familiar; how
has it been re