VII 
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 
very frequently overlooked. It is an essential part of Mi*. 
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- 
