Mr Darwin, and a large number of those who are called Darwinians, profess to prove that all the order of organic nature may have been unintentionally originated by the mechanical operation of natural forces. They think they can explain how, from a few simple living forms, or even from a single primordial cell, the entire vegetable and animal kingdoms, with all their harmonies and beauties, have arisen wholly independent of any ordaining and presiding mind, by means of the operation of the law of heredity that like produces like; of variability from the action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; of over-production, or a ratio of increase so high as to lead to a struggle for existence; of natural selection, or the survival and prevalence of the fittest, and the disappearance and extinction of what is unsuited to its circumstances and inferior to its competitors; and of sexual selection. But the remarkable originality, ingenuity, and skill which they display in endeavouring to establish, illustrate, and apply these laws, make all the more striking the absence of freshness and independence, of force or relevancy, in the reasonings by which they would attach to them an irreligious inference. The same men who have adduced so many new facts, and thrown so much new light on facts previously known, in support of the real or alleged laws indicated, have not adduced a single new reason, and scarcely even set in a more plausible light a single old reason, for the denial of design. They assure us, copiously and vehemently, that the laws which they claim to have proved are in themselves a disproof of design; but they somehow forget that it is incumbent on them to bestow the labour requisite to make this manifest. They reason as if it were almost or wholly self-evident, whereas a little more thought would show them that all their laws imply mind and purpose.