CREATION BY LAW 163 



into a gull with webbed feet and a knife-like bill, living on 

 flesh, in the longest possible time and in the most laborious 

 possible way, we may conceive it to pass from the one to the 

 other state by natural selection. The battle of life the ducks 

 will have to fight will increase in peril continually as they 

 cease (with the change of their bill) to be ducks, and attain a 

 maximum of danger in the condition in which they begin to 

 be gulls ; and ages must elapse and whole generations must 

 perish, and countless generations of the one species be created 

 and sacrificed, to arrive at one single pair of the other." 



In this passage the theory of natural selection is so absurdly 

 misrepresented that it would be amusing, did we not consider 

 the misleading effect likely to be produced by this kind of 

 teaching in so popular a journal. It is assumed that the duck 

 and the gull are essential parts of nature, each well fitted for its 

 place, and that if one had been produced from the other by 

 a gradual metamorphosis, the intermediate forms would have 

 been useless, unmeaning, and unfitted for any place in the 

 system of the universe. Now, this idea can only exist in a 

 mind ignorant of the very foundation and essence of the 

 theory of natural selection, which is, the preservation of useful 

 variations only, or, as has been well expressed, in other words, 

 the " survival of the fittest." Every intermediate form which 

 could possibly have arisen during the transition from the duck 

 to the gull, so far from having an unusually severe battle to 

 fight for existence, or incurring any "maximum of danger," 

 would necessarily have been as accurately adjusted to the rest 

 of nature, and as well fitted to maintain and to enjoy its 

 existence, as the duck or the gull actually are. If it were not 

 so, it never could have been produced under the law of natural 

 selection. 



Intermediate or generalised Forms of extinct Animals, an 



indication of Transmutation or Development 

 The misconception of this writer illustrates another point 

 yery frequently overlooked. It is an essential part of Mr. 

 Darwin's theory that one existing animal has not been 

 derived from any other existing animal, but that both are the 

 descendants of a common ancestor, which was at once different 

 from either, but, in essential characters, to some extent inter- 



