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paddles of a whale ? Can't say. You ask me also, whether this 

 last-named came by " Natural Selection" from a fish, a reptile, 

 or a beast, or from all three at once ? I say that it came from 

 something, or that something came from it. Which way it was, 

 I leave you to find out for yourself, if you can. 



I believe also, as to birds, in the "survival " of the strongest, . 

 though the marks of the footsteps and the egg of a bird have 

 been found which must have been twice as large as an ostrich. 



I believe the same as to flying reptiles, though I have before 

 me the fossil remains of the Pterodactyle, an enormous vampire, 

 with a long snout like a crocodile, and which was able either to 

 swim, fly, or creep, or to hang by its claws from trees. You tell 

 me that Buckland said that all these " point out unity of purpose 

 and deliberate design in some intelligent First Cause, from which 

 they were all derived." I think no more of Buckland than I do 

 of Cuvier, or Sedgwick, or any other such. How could either of 

 them be Darwin ? I should like to know. Who cares for the 

 opinion of any of them, or of all of them ? I do not, for one, 

 not I ! I have told you so before, and I tell you so once more. 



I believe that mv work on the Origin of Species is a marvel of 

 reasoning power, inasmuch as I have dispensed in it with all the 

 rules of logic ; and as to my grand way of accounting for the 

 gradual formation of an eye by means of a succession of millions 

 upon millions of improvements, each and all the results of millions 

 of accidental alterations, and an infinitely greater number of 

 destructions, it is, I need not tell you, the ne-plus-ultra of 

 ' philosophical argument. Mr. Pritchard, the President of the 

 Royal Astronomical Society, has indeed said, that my guess- 

 work is not less improbable than if all the letters in my book 

 were placed in a box, and on being shaken together millions on 

 millions of times, should at last come out in the exact order in 

 which I wrote them. All such arguments are utterly thrown 

 away on me, so he might have saved himself the trouble of 

 propounding them. My self-sufficiency is not so easily shaken as 

 all that. 



I believe that the shifting of the eye of the flounder from below 

 to above, as it grows, is the result of evolution, not of design. 



