ON THE LATEST FORM OF THE DEVELOPMENT THEORY. 105 
existed " as connecting links, and a still greater crowd of other Varieties not interme- 
diate, but gross, rude, and purposeless in their formation, — the unmeaning creations 
of an unconscious cause, — must all have perished, each through its own peculiar repe- 
tition of a series of events so infrequent that we can hardly compute the chances of 
their happening at all. 
It is easy to see why the extermination of a Species, even upon the conditions of 
Mr. Darwin's theory, should be so infrequent. He holds that all the races which have 
originated upon the earth since the primeval act of creation first grudgingly threw 
only four or five seeds of existence into the ground, have been shaded into each other 
by gradations so slight as to be nearly imperceptible. Differing so slightly from each 
other, the advantage possessed by any one of them in the Struggle for Life must have 
been almost indefinitely small. But a peculiarity important enough to preserve those 
who have it, while whole Species must die out because they have it not, cannot be thus 
trifling in character. It must have been one of grave moment; not a slight Variation, 
but a jump. The successive development of new races — itself, as we have seen, an 
extremely slow process — must have been continued through numerous steps, before 
the divergence resulting from it could have been serious enough to enable one of the 
divergent stocks to overcome and exterminate the other. Numerous Species of the 
same genus now coexist, often within the bounds of a not very extended territory, 
without any one of them showing any tendency to supplant or exterminate another. 
Thus, South Africa is the country par excellence of the antelope; about fifty species 
of this animal have been found there, many of them very abundant, notwithstanding 
the numerous Carnivora that prey upon them, and yet none of them showing any 
tendency to die out before civilized man came thither and brought gunpowder along 
with him. 
Natural Selection can sima only upon races previously brought into being by 
= other causes. In itself, it is powerless either to create or exterminate. In the Devel- 
opment Theory, its only function is, when the number of different Species is so far 
multiplied that they crowd upon each other, and the extinction of one or more becomes 
inevitable (if we can conceive of such a case) then to make the selection, or to deter- 
mine which shall be the survivors and which the victims. As individuals of the same 
Species, the same Variety, and even of the same flock, certainly differ much from each 
other in strength, swiftness, courage, powers of endurance, and other qualities, Natu- 
ral Selection has an undoubted part to play, when the struggle comes for such a flock, 
in determining which of its members shall succumb. But that it ever, plays a narto 
sponding part in the grand contest of Species imagined by Mr. Darwin, is a supposition 
VOL. VIII. 14 
