If these appearances of adaptation were fallacious, if the apparent utility were undesigned, the chances against the perpetual recurrence of so singularly useful, rather than of some totally useless, set of combinations would be a multiple of innumerosity similar to that which has clearly been shown to represent the preponderance of probability against the constant repetition of any set of combinations whatever, whether useful or useless. If, then, it were permissible to use so extravagant an hyperbole to indicate an idea of multitude to which it is not in the power of words to give adequate expression, it might be said that while the chances against Nature's habitual action being _unintentional_, or the result as it were of mere fidgettiness or restlessness, are an indefinite multiple of infinity, the chances against its being _purposeless_ and _undesigned_, without view to end or object, is the same multiple doubled. Still, in order to give the solitary and infinitesimal chance on the other side its full due, let us confess it to be as yet not quite conclusively demonstrated that the actual order of inorganic, and the actual constitution of organic, nature are results of uninterrupted repetition of one and the same purposeless volition, and of the same purely fortuitous concourses of atoms. Let us admit it to be not absolutely impossible, not utterly inconceivable, that vegetable and animal organisms were not contrived such as they are with any view to their becoming habitations of vegetable and animal life, but that having been accidentally discovered to be fit to be lived in, they have been taken possession of by life and inhabited accordingly; that, similarly, the wondrously complex and varied mechanisms of which most organisms are composed were not made to be used, but are used because certain uses have been accidentally discovered for them--the eye, for instance, to take one example out of myriads not less remarkable, not having been meant to be seen with, but being employed for seeing because, by a happy coincidence, the particles composing it have got to be collocated in such wise that a picture of whatever is opposite to it is formed upon the retina, and is thence by a nervous concatenation transmitted to the brain. Although, if the most consummate skill, in comparison with which that displayed in the fabrication of Mr. Newall's telescope were downright clumsiness, had striven to devise a seeing apparatus, capable of exact self-adjustment to all degrees of light, all gradations of distance, all varieties of refrangibility, it could not have adopted a contrivance more exquisitely ingenious, or evincing more minutely accurate knowledge of the most secret laws of optics, than the mechanism of the eye apparently betokens, let it still be admitted to be not quite beyond the bounds of possibility, that not skill but the blindest and densest ignorance may have presided over the whole operation. But even