But overpowering proof of intelligence and
benevolent design lie all around us, and if ever perplexities, whether
metaphysical or scientific, turn us away from them for a time, they come
back upon us with irresistible force, showing to us through nature the
influence of a free will, and teaching us that all living beings depend
upon one ever-acting Creator and Ruler."

It is impossible for even Mr. Darwin, inconsistent as it is with his
whole theory, to deny all design in the constitution of nature. What is
his law of heredity? Why should like beget like? Take two germ cells,
one of a plant, another of an animal; no man by microscope or by
chemical analysis, or by the magic power of the spectroscope, can detect
the slightest difference between them, yet the one infallibly develops
into a plant and the other into an animal. Take the germ of a fish and
of a bird, and they are equally indistinguishable; yet the one always
under all conditions develops into a fish and the other into a bird.
Why is this? There is no physical force, whether light, heat,
electricity, or anything else, which makes the slightest approximation
to accounting for that fact. To say, as Stuart Mill would say, that it
is an ultimate fact, and needs no explanation, is to say that there may
be an effect without an adequate cause. The venerable R. E. Von Baer,
the first naturalist in Russia, of whom Agassiz speaks in terms of such
affectionate veneration in the "Atlantic Monthly" for January, 1874, has
written a volume dated Dorpat, 1873, and entitled "Zum Streit ueber den
Darwinismus." In that volume, as we learn from a German periodical, the
author says: "The Darwinians lay great stress on heredity; but what is
the law of heredity but a determination of something future? Is it not
in its nature in the highest degree teleological? Indeed, is not the
whole faculty of reproduction intended to introduce a new life-process?
When a man looks at a dissected insect and examines its strings of eggs,
and asks, Whence are they? the naturalist of our day has no answer to
give, but that they were of necessity gradually produced by the changes
in matter. When it is further asked, Why are they there? is it wrong to
say, It is _in order that_ when the eggs are mature and fertilized, new
individuals of the same form should be produced."

It is further to be considered that there are innumerable cases of
contrivance, or evidence of design in nature, to which the princip