conciled with infinite wisdom? Let the following passage
answer for a thousand:--'The embryo is nothing like the miniature of the
adult. For a long while the body in its entirety and in its details,
presents the strangest of spectacles. Day by day and hour by hour, the
aspect of the scene changes, and this instability is exhibited by the
most essential parts no less than by the accessory parts. One would say
that nature feels her way, and only reaches the goal after many times
missing the path' (on dirait que la nature tatonne et ne conduit son
oeuvre a bon fin, qu'apres s'etre souvent trompee)."[21]

The above passage does not, I think, affect the evidence for design
which we adduced in the preceding chapter. However strange the process
of manufacture may appear, when the work comes to be turned out the
design is too manifest to be doubted.

If the reader were to come upon some lawyer's deed which dealt with
matters of such unspeakable intricacy, that it baffled his imagination
to conceive how it could ever have been drafted, and if in spite of this
he were to find the intricacy of the provisions to be made, exceeded
only by the ease and simplicity with which the deed providing for them
was found to work in practice; and after this, if he were to discover
that the deed, by whomsoever drawn, had nevertheless been drafted upon
principles which at first seemed very foreign to any according to which
he was in the habit of drafting deeds himself, as for example, that the
draftsman had begun to draft a will as a marriage settlement, and so
forth--yet an observer would not, I take it, do either of two things. He
would not in the face of the result deny the design, making himself
judge rather of the method of procedure than of the achievement. Nor yet
after insisting in the manner of Paley, on the wonderful proofs of
intention and on the exquisite provisions which were to be found in
every syllable--thus leading us up to the highest pitch of
expectation--would he present us with such an impotent conclusion as
that the designer, though a living person and a true designer, was yet
immaterial and intangible, a something, in fact, which proves to be a
nothing: an omniscient and omnipotent vacuum.

Our observer would feel he need not have been at such pains to establish
his design if this was to be the upshot of his reasoning. He would
therefore admit the design, and by consequence the designer, but would
probably ask a little ti