Sir Everard Home, or Professor Cuvier,
by way of giving a sort of philosophical eclat to the affair, and
throwing a little learned dust in the eyes of the public. Paley,
however, advises you to make your own observations when you happen to
be engaged in the scientific operation of picking the leg or wing of a
chicken. The very singular correspondence between the two sides of any
animal, the right hand answering to the left, and so on, is touched
upon, as a proof of a contriving Creator, and a very striking one it
is. Well! we have a long and abstruse problem in chances worked out to
show that it was so many millions, and so many odd thousands to one,
that accident could not have produced the phenomenon; not a bit of it.
Paley, who was probably scratching his head at the moment, offers
no other confirmation of his assertion, than that it is the most
difficult thing in the world to get a _wig made even_, seldom as it is
that the _face_ is made awry. The circulation of the blood, and the
provision for its getting from the heart to the extremities, and back
again, affords a singular demonstration of the Maker of the body being
an admirable Master both of mechanics and hydrostatics. But what is
the language in which Paley talks of this process?--technical?--that
mystical nomenclature of Diaforius, which frightens country patients
out of their wits, thinking, as they very naturally do, that a disease
must be very horrid which involves such very horrid names? Hear our
anatomist from Giggleswick.

"The aorta of a whale is larger in the bore than the main-pipe of the
water-works at London Bridge; and the roaring in the passage through
that pipe is inferior, in impetus and velocity, to the blood gushing
from the whale's heart."

He cares not whence he fetches his illustrations, provided they are to
the purpose. The laminae of the feathers of birds are kept together by
teeth that hook into one another, "as a _latch_ enters into the catch,
and fastens a door." The eyes of the mole are protected by being very
small, and buried deep in a cushion of skin, so that the apertures
leading to them are like _pin-holes in a piece of velvet_, scarcely
pervious to loose particles of earth. The snail without wings, feet,
or thread, adheres to a stalk by a provision of _sticking-plaster_.
The lobster, as he grows, is furnished with a way of uncasing himself
of his buckler, and drawing his legs out of _his boots_ when they
become too small for