was both designed and preferred makes it a special creation. To suppose that it was left to be worked out by a process such as the hypothesis of evolution assumes, by the gradual, fortuitous, and ungoverned operation of infinitely slow-moving causes, which might have made the adjustments very different from what they are, is to deprive it of the element of intentional preference that is proved by its existence. The hypothesis of evolution, when applied to all the phenomena of the solar system, relegates one great branch of those phenomena to a realm from which all special purposes and all direct design are absent, and confines the explanation of the phenomena to the operation of causes that might have brought about very different arrangements. That this supposed process of evolution has, in fact, been followed by the existing arrangements of the solar system, does not prove, or tend to prove, that the existing arrangements are solely due to the supposed method of their production; for we can not leave out the element of some design, and if there was a design, the very nature of the system required that the design should be executed by a special creation of a plan for the mutual relations of the bodies composing it. The bodies themselves might have been gradually formed out of diffused matter, floating loosely in the realms of space. The relations of the bodies to each other required the act of an intelligent will, in the direct formation of an intentional plan; and that act was an act of special creation in the same sense in which the structural plan of a species of animal was a special creation.