By making their
variations mainly due to effort and intelligence, they made organic
development run on all-fours with human progress, and with
inventions which we have watched growing up from small beginnings.
They made the development of man from the amoeba part and parcel of
the story that may be read, though on an infinitely smaller scale,
in the development of our most powerful marine engines from the
common kettle, or of our finest microscopes from the dew-drop.
The development of the steam-engine and the microscope is due to
intelligence and design, which did indeed utilize chance
suggestions, but which improved on these, and directed each step of
their accumulation, though never foreseeing more than a step or two
ahead, and often not so much as this. The fact, as I have elsewhere
urged, that the man who made the first kettle did not foresee the
engines of the Great Eastern, or that he who first noted the
magnifying power of the dew-drop had no conception of our present
microscopes--the very limited amount, in fact, of design and
intelligence that was called into play at any one point--this does
not make us deny that the steam-engine and microscope owe their
development to design.
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