5l8 STRUCTURE AND LIFE HISTORIES 



a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, 

 and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Diver- 

 gence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved 

 forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and 

 death, the most exalted object which we are capable of 

 conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, 

 directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, 

 with its several powers having been originally breathed 

 by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, 

 whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the 

 fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless 

 forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and 

 are being evolved." 



443. Objections from Scientists. — Objections to Dar- 

 win's theory were also brought forward by scientific men — 

 partly from prejudice, but chiefly because they demanded 

 (and rightly) more evidence, especially on certain points 

 which seemed at variance with the theory. For example, 

 they said, no one has ever observed a new species develop 

 from another; this ought to be possible if evolution by 

 natural selection is now in progress. The absence of 

 "connecting links," or transitional forms between two 

 related species was noted; the presence of apparently 

 useless characters (of which there are plenty in both ani- 

 mals and plants) was not accounted for; and the geologists 

 and astronomers claimed that the time required for evolu- 

 tion to produce the organic world as we now behold it is 

 longer than the age of the earth as understood from geolog- 

 ical and astronomical evidence. 



There is not space here to summarize the answers to all 

 these objections. Suffice it to say that scientific investi- 

 gation since Darwin's time has given us reasonably satis- 



