"perfection here below" is relative, not absolute,--and illustrating
this by the circumstance, that European animals, and especially
plants, are now proving to be better adapted for New Zealand than many
of the indigenous ones,--that "the correction for the aberration of
light is said, on high authority, not to be quite perfect even in that
most perfect organ, the eye." And then follows the second extract of
the reviewer. But what is the position of the reviewer upon his own
interpretation of these passages? If he insists that green woodpeckers
were specifically created so in order that they might be less liable
to capture, must he not equally hold that the black and pied ones were
specifically made of these colors in order that they might be more
liable to be caught? And would an explanation of the mode in which
those woodpeckers came to be green, however complete, convince him
that the color was undesigned?

As to the other illustration, is the reviewer so complete an optimist
as to insist that the arrangement and the weapon are wholly perfect
(_quoad_ the insect) the normal use of which often causes the animal
fatally to injure or to disembowel itself? Either way it seems to us
that the argument here, as well as the insect, performs _hari-kari_.

The "Examiner" adds:--"We should in like manner object to the word
_favorable_, as implying that some species are placed by the Creator
under _unfavorable_ circumstances, at least under such as might be
advantageously modified." But are not many individuals and some races
of men placed by the Creator "under unfavorable circumstances, at
least under such as might be advantageously modified"? Surely these
reviewers must be living in an ideal world, surrounded by "the
faultless monsters which _our_ world ne'er saw," in some elysium where
imperfection and distress were never heard of! Such arguments resemble