The hand : its mechanism and vital endowments as evincing design / by Sir Charles Bell.

  • Charles Bell
Date:
1852
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The hand : its mechanism and vital endowments as evincing design / by Sir Charles Bell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    mechanical construction of animals, as in their endow- ments of life, they are created in relation to the whole, planned together and fashioned by one Mind. A comparison made between the system of an animal body, and the condition of the earth’s surface, is highly illustrative of design in both. In the animal, we see matter withdrawn from the influences which arrange things dead and inorganic ; but this matter, thus ap])ro- priated to the animal, and newly endowed through the influence of life, continues to possess such qualities of inanimate matter as are necessary to constitute the living being a part of the system—an inhabitant of the earth. To what then does this argument lead ? Is it not, that as the beautiful structure of the animal, and the perfection in the arrangement of its parts demon- strate design — so design extends to the condition of the earth also; and over both there is a ruhng Intelligence ? Men who have studied deeply, and who have become authorities in natural science, acquire a happy spirit of contentment and true philosophy; of which we have examples in Grew,* in Bay, and in Linnseus. The last, resting from his great labours in universal nature, and struck with the perfection and order evinced in the whole, breaks out, very naturally and eloquently, in admiration of the just relation of all things, as provmg them to be the work of one Almighty Being. Then * A naturalist, who wrote on the anatomy of Plants ; also, Cosmologia Sacra, a Discourse on the Universe, as the creature and kingdom of God.’’