Let us set beside Paley’s argument on the annular ligament of the ankle a passage from a modern scientific work, Strasburger’s Text Book of Botany. It will introduce us, from the side of the strictest scientific observation and of the fullest acceptance of the evolution theory, to the same kind of problems as those discussed in Paley’s Natural Theology, and it will raise in a very distinct and unevadable fashion the question, what we are to think of the power manifested in the operations of Nature. In the introduction to his work, in which Dr. Strasburger had associated with him three other eminent German botanists, we find the following remarkable passage dealing with circumstances observed to exist in the ‘phylogenetic’ or tribal (as opposed to the ‘ontogenetic’ or individual) history of plant species:— “Although the great importance of natural selection in the development of the organic world has been fully recognised by most naturalists, the objection has been raised that it alone is not a sufficient explanation of all the different processes in the phylogeny of an organism. Attention has been called to such organs as would be incapable of exercising their function until in an advanced stage of development, and so could not originally have been of any advantage in a struggle for existence. How could natural selection tend to develop an organ which would be useless so long as it was still in a rudimentary condition? This objection has led to the supposition of an internal force residing in the substance of the organisms themselves and controlling their development in certain definite directions. Many naturalists indeed have gone so far as to affirm that only the less advantageous qualities have been affected by the struggle for existence, while the more advantageous have been uninfluenced by it”[9] One can easily imagine what a modern Paley bent on reconciling orthodoxy and evolution would say to this. He would cry, Design, forethought, intelligence—here is the clearest evidence of it! And indeed there are many modern biologists who do not shrink from the admission that the processes of nature must ultimately be interpreted in terms of will or intention, not in terms of chance or blind mechanism. Thus, to the Darwinian argument that organs can be and are, demonstrably, formed by gradual adaptation to surrounding conditions without assuming the necessity of purposeful design, it is often replied that the very fact of adaptability is itself one of the strongest evidences if not of design at least of purpose. And J. v. Uexküll, who describes life as consisting essentially in the fact that it proceeds according to design (_planmässig_), has the following remarkable passage in his Experimental Biology[10]:—