nded to
protect some delicate and precious article of jewelry, and that the
maker of this box must have been acquainted with the strength of wood,
the toughness of leather, the adhesiveness of glue, the softness and
elasticity of cotton, the tenacity of silk, and the mode of spinning and
weaving it, the form of the jewel to be placed in it, and the danger
against which this box would protect it--ten entirely distinct branches
of knowledge, which every child who should pick up such a box in the
street would unhesitatingly ascribe to its maker. Now, the box in which
the eye is placed is composed of seven bones glued together internally,
and covered with skin on the outside, lined with the softest fat,
enveloped in a tissue compared with which the finest silk is only
canvas, and the cavity is shaped so as exactly to fit the eye, while the
brow projects over like a roof of a veranda, to keep off falling dust
and rain from injuring it while the lid is open; and the eyebrows, like
a thatch sloping outward, conduct the sweat of the brow, by which a man
earns his bread, away around the outer cover, that it may not enter the
eye and destroy the sight. If it were preposterous nonsense to say that
electricity, or magnetism, or odyle, contrived and made a little
bracelet box, how much more absurd to ascribe the making of the cavity
of the eye to any such cause.

Let us next look at the shape of the eye. You observe it is nearly round
in its section across, and rather oval in its other direction, and the
cavity it lies in is shaped exactly to fit it. Now there are eyes in the
world angular and triangular, and even square; and as you may readily
suppose, the creatures which have them can not move them; to compensate
for such inconvenience, some of them, as the common fly, have several
hundred. But, unless our heads were as large as sugar hogsheads, we
could not be so furnished, and we must either have movable eyes or see
only in one direction. Accordingly, the Contriver of the eye has hung it
with a hinge. Now there are various kinds of hinges, moving in one
direction, and the Maker of the eye might have made a hinge on which the
eye would move up and down, or he might have given us a hinge that would
bend right and left, in which case we should have been able merely to
squint a little in two directions. But to enable one to see in every
direction, there is only one kind of hinge that would answer the
purpose--the ball and socket joi