Now such an adjustment must surely be accepted as a proof of design, exercised in the formation of the world. Why should the solar year be so long and no longer? or, this being of such a length, why should the vegetable cycle be exactly of the same length? Can this be chance? And this occurs, it is to be observed, not in one, or in a few species of plants, but in thousands. Take a small portion only of known species, as the most obviously endowed with this adjustment, and say ten thousand. How should all these organized bodies be constructed for the same period of a year? How should all these machines be wound up so as to go for the same time? Even allowing that they could bear a year of a month longer or shorter, how do they all come within such limits? No chance could produce such a result. And if not by chance, how otherwise could such a coincidence occur, than by an intentional adjustment of these two things to one another? by a selection of such an organization in plants, as would fit them to the earth on which they were to grow; by an adaptation of construction to conditions; of the scale of the construction to the scale of the conditions. It cannot be accepted as an explanation of this fact in the economy of plants, that it is necessary to their existence; that no plants could possibly have subsisted, and come down to us, except those which were thus suited to their place on earth. This is true; but this does not at all remove the necessity of recurring to design as the origin of the construction by which the existence and continuance of plants is made possible. A watch could not go, except there were the most exact adjustment in the forms and positions of its wheels; yet no one would accept it as an explanation of the origin of such forms and positions, that the watch would not go if these were other than they are. If the objector were to suppose that plants were originally fitted to years of various lengths, and that such only have survived to the present time, as had a cycle of a length equal to our present year, or one which could be accommodated to it; we should reply, that the assumption is too gratuitous and extravagant to require much consideration; but that, moreover, it does not remove the difficulty. How came the functions of plants to be _periodical_ at all? Here is, in the first instance, an agreement in the form of the laws that prevail in the organic and in the inorganic world, which appears to us a clear evidence of design in their Author. And the same kind of reply might be made to any similar objection to our argument. Any supposition that the universe has gradually approximated to that state of harmony among the operations of its different parts, of which we have one instance in the coincidence now under consideration, would make it necessary for the objector to assume a previous state of things preparatory to this perfect correspondence. And in this preparatory condition we should still