RUDIMENTARY ORGANS. 73 
Did he attempt to spring into the air and seize a passing 
insect, and reach out his paws to catch it? And did 
those paws gradually become enlarged, till, after some 
generations, they were real wings? But what happened 
in the meantime to those connecting links whose wings 
were but partly developed? A bat with wings only half 
grown would be a helpless creature, and would surely 
perish. A mole with hands terminating in long, slender 
fingers, would be helpless, and would perish. There 
is no middle ground. If the ancestor of the bat was a 
terrestrial creature, with limbs fitted for walking, then it 
must have given birth to a full-fledged bat, fitted for 
flying. There could have been no middle stage, for 
such a creature would have been helpless, and must have 
perished. 
All this applies with equal force to the diversified and 
often highly complex structure of plants. As the or- 
gans of the various plants are now constituted, they most 
admirably serve their purpose. Given a slight change, 
an underdevelopment, and the individual would perish. 
But such underdeveloped stages must have occurred in 
the history of every life-form on earth, if a change 
through slow adaptations is to be accepted as a hypothesis 
to-account for their present form. To our mind, this 
matter of rudimentary structures presents an insuperable 
obstacle to acceptance of the evolutionary hypothesis even 
on scientific grounds. 
