ations, particulate or chemical, they amount to something
like this: you have half a cart-load of bricks from one yard and half a
cart-load from another, and when the bricks are dumped down in an
appropriate place they form a little house, just like those occupied by
the managers of the brickyards. So they may, but no one in his sense
supposes that they will thus arrange themselves of their own power.
Some one must arrange them. Who arranges the tiny bricks of which the
animal body consists, or what arranges them? To revert to our previous
example of the garden; suppose that we bring back from that which we
desire to copy a bag of seeds representing all the plants which it
contains. We have a plot of land of the same size as our example; we dig
it and we dung it and then we scatter our seeds perfectly haphazard over
its surface. What are the odds as to their coming up in an exactly
similar pattern to those in the other garden. Mathematicians, I suppose,
could calculate the probabilities, but they must be infinitesimally
small. Yet in the case of the animal the pattern is always observed.

It is quite useless for any one, however eminent an authority he may be,
to dismiss the matter by saying "It is a phenomenon of arrangement," for
that begs the whole question. A Martian visitor taken to Westminster
Abbey and told that its construction was a "phenomenon of arrangement"
might be expected to turn a scornful eye upon his cicerone and reply,
"Any fool can see that, but who arranged it?"

Hence, though wild horses would not drag such an admission from many, we
are irresistibly compelled to adopt the theory of a Creator and a
Maintainer also of nature and its operations--so-called--if we are to
escape from the absurdities involved in any other explanation. Thus
there are very important and fundamental matters to be deduced from the
very little which we know about inheritance, just as there are from a
hundred and one other lines of consideration related to this world and
its contents. We do not know very much--it may fairly be said we _know_
nothing as to the vehicle of inheritance. We know a little, but it is
still a very little even in comparison with what we may yet come to know
as the result of careful and long-continued experiment, about the laws
of inheritance. What we do learn from our knowledge, such as it is, is
the fact that we can give no intelligent or intelligible explanation of
the facts brought before us except