Page:A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings of Dr. Henry More.djvu/178

136 cast upon God and Nature will be easily discover'd and convicted of falshood, is we do but consider,

First, that Trees, Herbs and Flowers, that do not stir from their places, or exercise such fierce cruelty one upon another, are all in their several kinds handsome and elegant, and have no ineptitude or defect in them.

Secondly, that all Creatures born of putrefaction, as Mice and Frogs and the like, as those many hundreds of Insects, as Grashoppers, Flies, Spiders and such other, that these also have a most accurate contrivance of parts, and that there is nothing fram'd rashly or ineptly in any of them.

Lastly, in more perfect Creatures, as in the Scotch Barnacles, which Historians write of; of which if there be any doubt, yet Gerard relates that of his own knowledge, (which is as admirable, and as much to our purpose) there is a kinde of Fowl which in Lancashire are called Tree-Geese; they are bred out of rotten pieces of broken Ships and trunks of Trees cast upon a little Island in Lancashire they call the Pile of Foulders: the same Authour saith he hath found the like also in other parts of this Kingdom. Those Fowls in all respects, though bred thus of putrifaction (and that they are thus bred is undeniably true, as any man, if he please, may satisfie himself by consulting Gerard, the very last page of his History of Plants) are of as an exact Fabrick of Body, and as fitly contriv'd for the functions of such a kind of living Creature, as any of those that are produced by propagation. Nay, these kind of Fowls themselves do also propagate, which has imposed so upon the foolishness of some, that they have denied that other way of their generation; whenas the being generated one way does not exclude the other, as is seen in Frogs and Mice.

Wherefore those productions out of the Earth and of Putrefaction being thus perfect and accurate in all points as well as others, it is a manifest discovery that Nature did never frame any Species of things ineptly and foolishly, and that therefore she was ever guided by Counsel and Providence, that is, That Nature her self is the effect of an all-knowing God.

9. Nor doth this consideration only take away this present Evasion, but doth more palpably and intelligibly enervate the former. For what boots it them to flie unto an infinite propagation of Individualls in the same eternal Species, as they imagine, that they might be able alwayes to assign a Cause answerable to the Effect; whenas there are such Effects as these, and Products of Putrefaction, where Wisdom and Counsel are as truly conspicuous as in others? For thus are they nevertheless necessarily illaqueated in that inconvenience which they thought to have escaped by so quaint a subtilty. Rh