they were supposed to be a centre of combustion; and nowadays both these
theories have been abandoned for a third . . . Have these changes modified
in the slightest degree the supposed evidence of design?"


We have not the least idea why they should. So, also, of complicated
processes, such as human digestion, being replaced by other and simpler
ones in lower animals, or even in certain plants. If "we argue the
necessity of every adaptation solely from the fact that it exists," and
that "we cannot mutilate it grossly without injury to the function," we do
not "announce triumphantly that digestion is impossible in any way but
this," etc., but see equal wisdom and no impugnment of design in any number
of simpler adaptations accomplishing equivalent purposes in lower animals.

Finally, adaptation and utility being the only marks of design in Nature
which we possess, and adaptation only as subservient to usefulness, the
Westminster Reviewer shows us how:


"The argument from utility may be equally refuted another way. We found in
our discussion of the mark of adaptation that the positive evidence of
design afforded by the mechanisms of the human frame was never accompanied
by the possibility of negative evidence. We regarded this as a suspicious
circumstance, just as the fox, invited to attend the lion in his den, was
deterred from his visit by observing that all the foottracks lay in one
direction. The same suspicious circumstance warns us now. If positive
evidence of design be afforded by the presence of a faculty, negative
evidence of design ought to be afforded by the absence of a faculty. This,
however, is not the case." [Then follows the account of a butterfly, which,
from the wonderful power of the males to find the females at a great