be able to trace the rudiments of that harmony, for which it was proposed to account: so that even the most unbounded license of hypothesis would not enable the opponent to obliterate the traces of an intentional adaptation of one part of nature to another. Nor would it at all affect the argument, if these periodical occurrences could be traced to some proximate cause: if for instance it could be shown, that the budding or flowering of plants is brought about at particular intervals, by the nutriment accumulated in their vessels during the preceding months. For the question would still remain, how their functions were so adjusted, that the accumulation of the nutriment necessary for budding and flowering, together with the operation itself, comes to occupy exactly a year, instead of a month only, or ten years. There must be in their structure some reference to time: how did such a reference occur? how was it i determined to the particular time of the earth’s revolution round the sun? This could be no otherwise, as we conceive, than by design and appointment. We are left therefore with this manifest adjustment before us, of two parts of the universe, at first sight so remote; the dimensions of the solar system and the powers of vegetable life. These two things are so related, that one has been made to fit the other. The relation is as clear as that of a watch to a sundial. If a person were to compare the watch with the dial, hour after hour, and day after day, it would be impossible for him not to believe that the watch had been _contrived_ to accommodate itself to the solar day. We have at least ten thousand kinds of vegetable watches of the most various forms, which are all accommodated to the solar year; and the evidence of contrivance seems to be no more capable of being eluded in this case than in the other.