Criticisms on Origin of Species, Thomas Henry Huxley [best english novels for beginners .TXT] 📗

all the parts of thewatch to the function, or purpose, of showing the time, is held to beevidence that the watch was specially contrived to that end; on theground, that the only cause we know of, competent to produce such aneffect as a watch which shall keep time, is a contriving intelligenceadapting the means directly to that end.

Suppose, however, that any one had been able to show that the watch hadnot been made directly by any person, but that it was the result ofthe modification of another watch which kept time but poorly; and thatthis again had proceeded from a structure which could hardly be calleda watch at all--seeing that it had no figures on the dial and the handswere rudimentary; and that going back and back in time we came at lastto a revolving barrel as the earliest traceable rudiment of the wholefabric. And imagine that it had been possible to show that all thesechanges had resulted, first, from a tendency of the structure to varyindefinitely; and secondly, from something in