When it is further asked, Why are they there? is it wrong to
say, It is _in order that_ when the eggs are mature and fertilized, new
individuals of the same form should be produced."
It is further to be considered that there are innumerable cases of
contrivance, or evidence of design in nature, to which the principle of
natural selection, or the purposeless changes effected by unconscious
force, cannot apply; as for example, the distinction of sex, with all
that is therein involved. But passing by such cases, it may be asked,
what would it avail to get rid of design in the vegetable and animal
kingdom, while the whole universe is full of it? That this ordered
Cosmos is not from necessity or chance, is almost a self-evident fact.
Not one man in a million of those who ever heard of God, either does
doubt or can doubt it. Besides how are the cosmical relations of light,
heat, electricity, to the constituent parts of the universe, and
especially, so far as this earth is concerned, to vegetable and animal
life, to be accounted for? Is this all chance work? Is it by chance that
light and heat cause plants to carry on their wonderful operations,
transmuting the inorganic into the organic, dead matter into living and
life sustaining matter? Is it without a purpose that water instead of
contracting, expands at the freezing point?--a fact to which is due that
the earth north of the tropic is habitable for man or beast.
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