e, are preserved, on the principle of the survival of
the fittest. He urges the usual objections to teleology derived from
undeveloped or useless organs, as web-feet in the upland goose and
frigate-bird, which never swim.

What, however, perhaps more than anything, makes clear his rejection of
design is the manner in which he deals with the complicated organs of
plants and animals. Why don't he say, they are the product of the divine
intelligence? If God made them, it makes no difference, so far as the
question of design is concerned, how He made them: whether at once or by
a process of evolution. But instead of referring them to the purpose of
God, he laboriously endeavors to prove that they may be accounted for
without any design or purpose whatever.

"To suppose," he says, "that the eye with all its inimitable
contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for
admitting different degrees of light, and for the correction of
spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural
selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree." (p.
222) Nevertheless he attempts to explain the process. "It is scarcely
possible," he says, "to avoid comparing the eye with the telescope. We
know that this instrument has been perfected by the long continued
efforts of the highest of human intellects; and we naturally infer that
the eye has been formed by a somewhat analogous process. But may not
this inference be presumptuous? Have we any right to assume that the
Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man? If we must
compare the eye to an optical instrument, we ought in imagination to
take a thick layer of transparent tissue, with spaces filled with fluid,
and with a nerve sensitive to light beneath, and then suppose every part
of this layer to be continually changing slowly in density, so as to
separate into layers of different densities and thicknesses, placed at
different distances from each other, and with the surfaces of each layer
slowly changing in form. Further, we must suppose that there is a power
represented by natural selection, or the survival of the fittest, always
intently watching each slight alteration in the transparent layers, and
carefully preserving each, which, under varied circumstances, tends to
produce a distinct image. We must suppose each new state of the
instrument to be multiplied by the million; each to be preserved until a
better is produced, and the o