The only instances of natural selection which have been adduced to show that blind forces may bring about results as remarkable, and of the same kind, as those which are accomplished by intelligent agents, are manifestly irrelevant. They are of such a nature that every teleologist must hold them to imply what they are intended to disprove. When Professor Huxley points to the winds and waves of the Bay of Biscay as carefully selecting the particles of sea-sand on the coast of Brittany, and heaping them, according to their size and weight, in different belts along the shore; to a frosty night selecting the hardy plants in a plantation from among the tender ones; and to a hurricane transporting a sapling to a new seat in the soil,--he completely mistakes what the problem before him is. Fire and water can produce wonderful effects in a steam-engine; but the man who should infer, from there being no intelligence in the fire and water themselves, that intelligence must have had nothing to do with their effects when they were brought into contact in a steam-engine, would deserve no great credit for his reasoning. It is precisely Professor Huxley's reasoning. He looks at the fire and water separately, and completely ignores the engine. Because in a world which is a system of order and law a certain collocation and combination of physical conditions and forces will produce an orderly result, he infers that design and intelligence are not needed to produce such a result. I submit that that is illegitimate and irrelevant reasoning. It resolves itself into a denial of Divine and intelligent agency, because the senses apprehend merely physical elements and a physical process. It assumes a selected adaptation, which presupposes intelligence in order to get rid of intelligence. It begs the whole question. The so-called law of sexual selection, if it be a law at all, is obviously teleological in its nature. Its end is the production of beauty in form and colour. Can blind physical forces, if not subservient to intelligence, be conceived of as working towards so essentially ideal a goal as beauty? I think enough has now been said to show that the researches and speculations of the Darwinians have left unshaken the design argument. I might have gone farther if time had permitted, and proved that they had greatly enriched the argument. The works of Mr Darwin are invaluable to the theologian, owing to the multitude of "beautiful contrivances" and "marvellous adjustments" admirably described in them. The treatises on the fertilisation of orchids and on insectivorous plants require only to have their legitimate conclusions deduced and applied in order to be transformed into treatises of natural theology. If Paley's famous work be now somewhat out of date, it is not because Mr Darwin and his followers have refuted it, but because they have brought so much to light which confirms its argument.[34] [34] See Appendix XXIV.