ble 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 reconciled 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)." {134a}

The above passage does not, I think, affect the evidence for design which
we adduced in the preceding chapter. {134b} 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