RECAPITULATION. 451 



liable to be supplanted by the allied forms on either hand; 

 for the latter, from existing in greater numbers, would gen- 

 erally be modified and improved at a quicker rate than the 

 intermediate varieties, which existed in lesser numbers; so 

 that the intermediate varieties would, in the long run, be 

 supplanted and exterminated. 



On this doctrine of the extermination of an infinitude of 

 connecting links, between the living and extinct inhabitants 

 of the world, and at each successive period between the 

 extinct and still older species, why is not every geological 

 formation charged with such links ? Why does not every 

 collection of fossil remains afford plain evidence of the 

 gradation and mutation of the forms of life ? Although 

 geological research has undoubtedly revealed the former 

 existence of many links, bringing numerous forms of life 

 much closer together, it does not yield the infinitely many 

 fine gradations between past and present species required on 

 the theory, and this is the most obvious of the many objec- 

 tions which may be urged against it. Why, again, do whole 

 groups of allied species appear, though this appearance is 

 often false, to have come in suddenly on the successive 

 geological stages ? Although we now know that organic 

 beings appeared on this globe, at a period incalculably re- 

 mote, long before the lowest bed of the Cambrian system 

 was deposited, why do we not find beneath this system great 

 •piles of strata stored with the remains of the progenitors of 

 ■the Cambrian fossils ? For on the theory, such strata must 

 rsomewhere have been deposited at these ancient and utterly 

 -unknown epochs of the world's history. 



I can answer these questions and objections only on the 

 .supposition that the geological record is far more imperfect 

 than most geologists believe. The number of specimens 1-n 

 all our museums is absolutely as nothing compared wit^h 

 the countless generations of countless species which have 

 certainly existed. The parent form of any two or more 

 species would not be in all its characters directly interme- 

 diate between its modified offspring, any more than the 

 rock-pigeon is directly intermediate in crop and tail be- 

 tween its descendants, the pouter and fantail pigeons. We 

 should not be able to recognize a species as the parent of 

 another and modified species, if we were to examine the two 

 ever so closely, unless we possessed most of the intermediate 

 links ; and owing to the imperfection of the geological record, 

 '.we have jio just right to expect to find so many links. If 



