[Footnote 1: "Quarterly Review," 1861, p. 20.]

(4) The fourth point, as previously stated, will be best treated by
stating beforehand what is the conclusion come to, and then justifying
it. My suggestion is that if we suppose a continuous evolution without a
series of designs prescribed before life began to develop, and without
any external guidance, then we are lost in difficulties. We cannot
account for why variation should set in in the very different ways it
does, nor why such a vast variety of divergent results should be
produced. We cannot account for the tendency to reversion to a previous
type, when artificial or accidental variation is not continually
maintained,[1] nor for the sterility of hybrids; nor, above all, for
evolution performing such freaks (if I may so say) as the origination of
our small finches and the tropical humming-birds from earlier
vertebrates through the Mesozoic reptiles, the pterodactyles,
_Odontornithes_ and subsequent forms. Supposing that the Almighty
Designer created a complete _cosmos_ of (1) the starry heavens and the
planetary system, (2) then a scheme whereby earth and water were to be
duly distributed over our planet; (3) established the relations by
which the external heavenly bodies were to regulate our seasons, tides,
and times (as we know they do). (4) Suppose, further, that the Designer
did not make "out of nothing" the series of finally developed animals as
we now have them, but "made the animals make themselves"--that is to
say, created the type, the ideal form, and adapted the laws and forces
which constitute environment, so that development of form should go on
regularly towards the appointed end, but in separate and appropriate
channels, each terminating when its object had been attained. Suppose
these conditions (which, as we shall afterwards see, are what
Revelation, fairly interpreted, declares) to exist; all the known