62 
each other, and with the surfaces of each layer slowly changing 
in form. Further, we must suppose that there is a power 
(natural selection) always intently watching each slight acci- 
dental alteration in the transparent layers ; and carefully 
selecting each alteration which, under varied circumstances, 
may in any way or in any degree tend to produce a distincter 
image. We must suppose each new state of the instru- 
ment to be multiplied by the million, and each to be preserved 
till a better be produced, and then the old ones to be destroyed. 
In living bodies, variation will cause the slight alteration, 
generation will multiply them almost infinitely, and natural 
selection will pick out with unerring skill each improvement. 
Let this process go on for millions on millions of years, and 
during each year on mdlions of individuals of many kinds j 
and may we not believe that a living optical instrument might 
thus be formed as superior to one of glass, as the works of the 
Creator are to those of man ? 
« If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ ex- 
isted which could not possibly have been formed by numerous 
successive slight modifications, my theory would absolutely 
break down. But I can find no such case. No doubt, many 
organs exist of which we do not know the transitional grades, 
more especially if we look to much-isolated species, round which, 
according to my theory, there has been much extinction ; or, 
again, if & we look to an organ common to all the members of a 
large class, — for in this latter case the organ must have been 
first formed at an extremely remote period, since which all the 
many members of the class have been developed, and in order 
to discover the early transitional grades through which the 
organ has passed, we should have to look to very ancient an- 
cestral forms, long since become extinct / 5 
Now, after carefully studying Mr. Darwin’s own arguments 
for the formation of the eye without skill in optics, I must 
confess that they fail to convince me in the slightest degree. 
They are founded on monstrous assumptions utterly unsup- 
ported by fact. They assume that any variation, however 
slight, of any animal organ can be transmitted by inheritance. 
That there are no natural limits whatever to this transmission ; 
while all experience and all our knowledge go to prove that 
there are limits that cannot be passed. That the tendency 
even of those deviations produced by man’s art in the animal 
and vegetable world, as admitted by Darwin himself, is ever 
to revert to the type from whence they proceeded rather than 
to diverge ad infinitum . That this law of natural selection 
does by no means account for myriads of facts in nature 
directly opposed to it. “ Take , 55 says Sir J ohn Herschel, 
