RECAPITULATION AND CONCLUSION 417 



supplanted by the allied forms on either hand ; and the 

 latter, from existing in greater numbers, will generally 

 be modified and improved at a quicker rate than the 

 intermediate varieties, which exist in lesser numbers ; 

 so that the intermediate varieties will, 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 in- 

 habitants 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 ? We meet with no such evidence, and 

 this is the most obvious and forcible of the many 

 objections which may be urged against my theory. 

 Why, again, do whole groups of allied species appear, 

 though certainly they often falsely appear, to have come 

 in suddenly on the several geological stages ? AVTiy do 

 we not find great piles of strata beneath the Silurian 

 system, stored with the remains of the progenitors 

 of the Silurian groups of fossils? For certainly on 

 my theory such strata must somewhere have been 

 deposited at these ancient and utterly unknown epochs 

 in the world's history. 



I can answer these questions and grave objections 

 only on the supposition that the geological record is far 

 more imperfect than most geologists believe. It cannot 

 be objected that there has not been time sufficient for 

 any amount of organic change ; for the lapse of time 

 has been so great as to be utterly inappreciable by the 

 human intellect. The number of specimens in all our 

 museums is absolutely as nothing compared with the 

 countless generations of countless species which cer- 

 tainly have existed. We should not be able to 

 recognise a species as the parent of any one or more 

 species if we were to examine them ever so closely, 

 unless we likewise possessed many of the intermediate 

 links between their past or parent and present states ; 

 and these many links we could hardly ever expect to 



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