Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 10.djvu/108

98 only final cause, but a designed general order in Nature. When I composed that work I was filled with admiration of the discoveries made by Goethe and Oken, by Owen and Agassiz, as to the beautiful "forms" in Nature. Some may think that the more recent doctrine of development has made that treatise obsolete. I admit that these late discoveries might require me in some places to change my mode of expression; and the time has scarcely arrived for rewriting that book, and will not arrive till Darwin's doctrine and Owen's doctrine are more thoroughly adjusted. But, meanwhile, the argument is as valid as it ever was, and proves that there is a designed order and beauty in Nature, the design being not less evident because the order and beauty have been brought about by a process of development. This has been shown fully and satisfactorily by St. George Mivart in a recent article in the Contemporary Review, entitled "Likenesses or Philosophical Anatomy," in which he writes in the same way as I did of homologies, and shows that many of these cannot be explained by development or by a descent from a common parentage. He shows that "there are likenesses between different animals and different parts of the same animal which a theory of common descent cannot explain." He specifies instances of lateral, vertical, and serial homology, such as the vertebrae which make up the backbone, all similar, and the likeness between "the thigh, leg, and foot, of the lower limb, evidently more or less repeating the upper arm, arm, and hand, of the upper limb." I am inclined to argue that there is evidence of design in homologies which may have been produced by descent, as when we see the pectoral limb of the horse, the whale, and the bird—whether fore-leg, paddle, or wing—formed on one type, though turned to very different uses. All that Owen and Agassiz have said about the anticipations and the prophecies in Nature may be acknowledged as true, even by those who hold that they have been produced by development, I do believe that these old horse-like forms were preparations for the horse now living. The efficient cause may have been development, but the formal cause (to use Aristotle's phrase) is the perfected animal. We cannot allow this evolution doctrine to shear Nature of its grandeurs, nor, we may add, morality of its binding obligations or the universe of its God. Mr. Mivart concludes: "The teaching of what we believe to be true philosophy is that the types shadowed forth to our intellects by material existences are copies of divine originals, and correspond to prototypal ideas in God."

I close this article with remarking that these views bring Nature and revelation, geology and genesis, into harmony.

The Book of God begins at the beginning—with Genesis, the generation of all things. Science does not seem to tell us of a beginning. The Bible opens, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." It tells us that there were an order and a progression in the generation of our world. First, there is an original creation.