V. VARIETIES, ETC, 55 
than half being allotted to the present plant-species, as their 
primitive Adams. How the first one, or first eight or ten, began 
and progressed, the theory fails to explain. Surely a “ Natural 
Selection” would not be potent enough to give an “origin” to 
these out of nothing! But is there anything observed in the 
present age at all sufficient to show that species are still increasing 
in numbers? Is there any sort of evidence on record to show that 
they have increased in the historical time? (Book-species increase 
fast, no doubt, but that sort of increase is beside the true 
question.) Is the geologic evidence enough to show, or even 
reasonably to suggest, that species are truly more numerous now 
than they were at any former period? When it suits his pur- 
pose, Mr. Darwin is very justly disposed to lay great stress on the 
extreme “imperfection of the geologic record.” The older in 
date, the more imperfect is it likely to be; and thus there seems a 
sufficiently good explanation of the more numerous species now or 
less long ago living, in contrast against the remains of less 
numerous species at the more remote epochs. On the other hand, 
if a single or half score original species could have increased by 
divergent variations into the tens or hundreds of thousands now 
existent,—what is to stay the progress of their numbers hence- 
forth? If eight or ten can diverge into (say) an existing million, 
why not one million into millions of millions ?— the millions of 
millions into....? At what figure or degree in the increasing 
thousands or millions is the limit to be fixed? Are not these 
simple queries something very like a reductio ad absurdum ? To 
assume or assert a period when only one, or ten, or a hundred 
species existed, is not reading the past by the present facts ;—it is 
inventing the past; fitting it badly with the present, incredibly 
with the future. 
Fourthly, to the writer of these pages it seems to be a great 
deficiency or insurmountable defect in the Darwinian theory, that 
it makes uo provision for a counterbalance in nature which seems 
warrantable enough as an hypothesis, and is abundantly obvious 
as a fact. The theory is wholly one of constantly successive 
divergence from antecedent forms, without taking into account 
