gh,--but better adjusted
and more perfect instruments or machines than intellect (that is,
human intellect) can contrive and human skill execute,--which no sane
person will believe.

On the other hand, if Darwin even admits--we will not say adopts--the
theistic view, he may save himself much needless trouble in the
endeavor to account for the absence of every sort of intermediate
form. Those in the line between one species and another supposed to be
derived from it he may be bound to provide; but as to "an infinite
number of other varieties not intermediate, gross, rude, and
purposeless, the unmeaning creations of an unconscious cause," born
only to perish, which a relentless reviewer has imposed upon his
theory,--rightly enough upon the atheistic alternative,--the theistic
view rids him at once of this "scum of creation." For, as species do
not now vary at all times and places and in all directions, nor
produce crude, vague, imperfect, and useless forms, there is no reason
for supposing that they ever did. Good-for-nothing monstrosities,
failures of purpose rather than purposeless, indeed sometimes occur;
but these are just as anomalous and unlikely upon Darwin's theory as
upon any other. For his particular theory is based, and even
over-strictly insists, upon the most universal of physiological laws,
namely, that successive generations shall differ only slightly, if at
all, from their parents; and this effectively excludes crude and
impotent forms. Wherefore, if we believe that the species were
designed, and that natural propagation was designed, how can we say
that the actual varieties of the species were not equally designed?
Have we not similar grounds for inferring design in the supposed
varieties of a species, that we have in the case of the supposed
species of a genus? When a naturalist comes to regard as three
closely-related species what he before took to be so many varieties of
one species, how has he thereby strengthened our conviction that the
three forms were designed to have the differences which they actually
exhibit? Wherefore, so long as gradated, orderly, and adapted forms in
Nature argue design, and at least while the physical cause of
variation is utterly unknown and mysterious, we should advise Mr.
Darwin to assume, in the philosophy of his hypothesis, that variation
has been led along certain beneficial lines. Streams flowing over a
sloping plain by gravitation (here the counterpart of natural
s