ESSAY IX. 435 tude of dogs, cats, lions, bears, horses, elephants, eagles, and whales, worms and flies, as well as of men and women, all form- ed with their millions of tubes and - fibres by exquisite wisdom, and all designed to be mere waste of nature, except those very few comparatively which come into the visible world as distinct animals ; since for every animalthat comes to be born there would be many millions lost and wasted according to this hypothesis? Is it possible that the wisdom and work of a Creator should be wasted in so insignificant a manner to support such an hypothesis or conjecture ? O. When a limb of an animal, or sortie necessary part of a plant has been broken off, what. powerful efforts has sometimes been observed in the operations of nature towards the formation of a new limb, or part of the same kind? I have seen the claw of a crab rising up in a less form, in the room of one which the creature seems to haie been deprived of by some injurious accident ; now I would enquire whether this creature was formed at first in its minute original, with three claws ? Or whether there was an actual provision made for every such accident in the first week of the creation ? In the vegetable world these regular productions of the new parts of a plant, are much more common. When the top of an ash is cut off to make a pollard of it, or of a plum-tree to make it bear more, or better fruit, I beg leave to enquire, whether all the branches, leaves, and fruit, that sprout afterward from the stock yearly in twenty, thirty, or forty years were formed actu- ally in the first ash, or plum-tree, that God created ? Did the Creator provide actually sufficient leaves and fruit in every first tree, to answer for such voluntary mutilations or loppings of the gardener in five or six thousand years to come ? How unreason- able is it to suppose this ? But on the other hand, if the natural laws of motion are left to form the limb of an animal, or the leaves, branches and fruit of a vegetable, on such occasions, why might not the same same divine wisdom contrive laws which might form the whole animal or vegetable in its appointed succes- sions in the course of nature ? In the formation of insects, and especially of larger animals, daily experiment destroys this hypothesis, by spewing us, that the animal, in several parts and members of it, is imperfect and defective in the embryo, the work is unfinished, and the laws of nature, finish it by degrees, till it becomes ripe for production.Se This account seems more exactly conformable to the words of scripture; Ps, cxxxix. 16. " Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being imperfect, and in thy book my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them." This same doctrine of the gradual formation of animals is maintained by plain reasoning upon fact by Dr. Woodward in'his Vindication of his Essay op the Natural History of the Earth, cited out of the Manuscript by Mr. Holloway, R 2
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTcyMjk=