g a superintending
intelligence; how, on the other, it compels ingenuity like Mr. Darwin's
to entrench itself behind a phrase of utterly unmeaning gibberish.

If you see a man moving slowly, with head down, over an extensive plain,
you may fairly suspect that he does not know where he is going, and
possibly does not mean to go anywhere in particular. But if you perceive
that on reaching a ditch he takes a leap over, you are quite sure that,
when leaping, he meant to get to the other side. To that extent his
saltatory movement is unequivocal evidence of design. It is perhaps to
escape the necessity of a similar inference that Mr. Darwin so
frequently quotes the proverb _Natura non facit saltum_; but, if so, he
leans on a broken reed--on a bit of proverbial philosophy as weak as the
weakest of Mr. Tupper's. That Nature does sometimes make a leap, and a
pretty long one, must be obvious to any visitor to the Museum of the
London College of Surgeons, who has examined the two-headed and
four-legged human foeti there preserved in spirits. It may be said
that these are leaps in the wrong direction. Be it so. Still, whoever
can leap backward can make an equal leap forward, and most people will
find the latter the easier feat of the two. The power, whatever it be,
that coupled together the Siamese Twins, and gave to those respected
brothers, the late William and Robert Chambers of Edinburgh, twelve
fingers and twelve toes apiece, would not have gone at all more out of
the way by doing, suddenly and at once, several of those things which
Mr. Darwin doubts not that it does slowly and by degrees--by single
acts, for instance, instead of by a succession of acts, aggregating into
the semblance of an optic nerve certain elements in the _sarcode_ of
certain low organisms, spreading out the nerve thus formed into a
network or retina, forming a number of separate pigment-cells into a
homogeneous cornea, and following up these first steps by others which,
how much soever more apparently complex, would cost comparatively little
after the earlier and simpler ones had been taken. Now let but the power
competent to do these things be credited with sense enough to be aware
of its competence, and it may then be regarded as not unlikely to have
done some of them on purpose. Whereupon, the genesis of the eye ceases
to be a mystery. All the appearances of contrivance that have resulted
from the operation find their obvious and complete explanation i