do not for a moment doubt that the real foot was
designed, but we are so astonished at the dexterity of the designer that
we are at a loss for some time to think who could have designed it, where
he can live, in what manner he studied, for how long, and by what
processes he carried out his design, when matured, into actual practice.
Until recently it was thought that there was no answer to many of these
questions, more especially to those which bear upon the mode of
manufacture. For the last hundred years, however, the importance of a
study has been recognised which does actually reveal to us in no small
degree the processes by which the human foot is manufactured, so that in
our endeavour to lay our hands upon the points of difference between the
kind of design with which the foot itself is designed, and the 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 uncomforta