Page:Geology and Mineralogy considered with reference to Natural Theology, 1837, volume 1.djvu/308

 304 of one great Class in the Articulated division of the Animal Kingdom. We do not find this instrument passing onwards, as it were, through a series of experimental changes, from more simple into more complex forms; it was created at the very first, in the fulness of perfect adaptation to the uses and condition of the class of creatures, to which this kind of eye has ever been, and is still appropriate.

If we should discover a microscope, or telescope, in the hand of an Egyptian Mummy, or beheath the ruins of Herculaneum, it would be impossible to deny that a knowledge of the principles of Optics existed in the mind by which such an instrument had been contrived. The same inference follows, but with cumulative force, when we see nearly four hundred microscopic lenses set side by side, in the compound eye of a fossil Trilobite; and the weight of the argument is multiplied a thousand fold, when we look to the infinite variety of adaptations by which similar instruments have been modified, through endless genera and species, from the long-lost Trilobites, of the Transition strata, through the extinct Crustaceans of the Secondary and Tertiary formations, and thence onward throughout existing Crustaceans, and the countless hosts of living Insects.

It appears impossible to resist the conclusions as to Unity of Design in a common Author, which are thus attested by such cumulative evidences of Creative Intelligence and Power; both, as infinitely surpassing the most exalted faculties of the human mind, as the mechanisms of the natural world, when magnified by the highest microscopes, are found to transcend the most perfect productions of human art.