,
conception.

Cats catch mice, small birds and the like, very well. Teleology tells
us that they do so because they were expressly constructed for so
doing--that they are perfect mousing apparatuses, so perfect and so
delicately adjusted that no one of their organs could be altered,
without the change involving the alteration of all the rest. Darwinism
affirms on the contrary, that there was no express construction
concerned in the matter; but that among the multitudinous variations of
the Feline stock, many of which died out from want of power to resist
opposing influences, some, the cats, were better fitted to catch mice
than others, whence they throve and persisted, in proportion to the
advantage over their fellows thus offered to them.

Far from imagining that cats exist 'in order' to catch mice well,
Darwinism supposes that cats exist 'because' they catch mice
well--mousing being not the end, but the condition, of their existence.
And if the cat type has long persisted as we know it, the interpretation
of the fact upon Darwinian principles would be, not that the cats
have remained invariable, but that such varieties as have incessantly
occurred have been, on the whole, less fitted to get on in the world
than the existing stock.

If we apprehend the spirit of the 'Origin of Species' rightly, then,
nothing can be more entirely and absolutely opposed to Teleology, as it
is commonly understood, than the Darwinian Theory. So far from being a
"Teleologist in the fullest sense of the word," we would deny that he
is a Teleologist in the ordinary sense at all; and we should say that,
apart from his merits as a naturalist, he has rendered a most remarkable
service to philosophical thought by enabling the student of Nature to
recognise, to their fullest extent, those adaptations to purpose which
are so striking in the organic world, and which Teleology has done
good service in keeping before our minds, without being false to the
fundamental principles of a scientific conception of the universe.
The apparently diverging teachings of the Teleologist and of the
Morphologist are reconciled by the Darwinian hypothesis.

But leaving our own impressions of the 'Origin of Species,' and turning
to those passages especially cited by Professor Kolliker, we cannot
admit that they bear the interpretation he puts upon them. Darwin, if we
read him rightly, does 'not' affirm that every detail in the structure
of an animal has been crea