Chance has played an important part in human history, and in all
life-history--often, no doubt, the main part--since history began. It
was by chance that Columbus discovered America; he simply blundered
upon it. He had set out on his voyage with something quite different
in view. But his ship, and the crew, and the voyage itself, were not
matters of chance but of purpose.

According to the selectionists' theory, chance gave the bird its
wings, the fish its fins, the porcupine its quills, the skunk its
fetid secretion, the cuttlefish its ink, the swordfish its sword, the
electric eel its powerful battery; it gave the giraffe its long neck,
the camel its hump, the horse its hoof, the ruminants their horns and
double stomach, and so on. According to Weismann, it gave us our eyes,
our ears, our hands with the fingers and opposing thumb, it gave us
all the complicated and wonderful organs of our bodies, and all their
circulation, respiration, digestion, assimilation, secretion,
excretion, reproduction. All we are, or can be, the selectionist
credits to Natural Selection.

Try to think of that wonderful organ, the eye, with all its marvelous
powers and adaptations, as the result of what we call chance or
Natural Selection. Well may Darwin have said that the eye made him
shudder when he tried to account for it by Natural Selection. Why, its
adaptations in one respect alone, minor though they be, are enough to
stagger any number of selectionists. I refer to the rows of peculiar
glands that secrete an oily substance, differing in chemical
composition from any other secretion, a secretion which keeps the
eyelids from sticking together in sleep. "Behavior as lawless as
snowflakes," says Whitman--a phrase which probably stuck to him from
Rousseau; but are snowflakes and raindrops lawless? To us creatures of
purpose, they are so because the order of their falling is haphazard.
They obey their own laws. Again we see chance working inside of law.

When the sower scatters the seed-grains from his hand, he does not and
cannot determine the point of soil upon which any of them shall fall,
but there is design in his being there and in sowing the seed.
Astronomy is an exact science, biology is not. The celestial events
always happen on time. The astronomers can tell us to the fraction of
a second when the eclipses of the sun and moon and the transit of the
inferior planets across the sun's disk will take place. They know and
have measu