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throwing out of small variations and survivals of the strongest, 
besides ever-recurring favourable contingencies, have to be 
repeated times without number. To evade these difficulties, 
our only resource is again and again to brandish our magic 
talisman of infinite time. 
X. As yet this long and painful process has only led to the 
evolution of horned individuals, and not a horned race. We 
must therefore invoke the theory of sexual selection, and 
suppose that the horned females fall in love with the horned 
appendage of their male companions. It is not easy for us to 
say what are the precise ideas which cows entertain of beauty. 
We know, however, that it is far from an invariable fact that 
the most handsome men and women unite in matrimony. Still, 
however, the assumption must be made, that the horned bull 
is irresistibly attractive to the horned cow before a horned 
species can be finally established by the forces at the service of 
this philosophy. 
82. It is hardly possible to go through these successions of 
indefinite eons of time, and of concurrences of lucky chances 
with gravity, and suppose that they constitute a true account of 
the past history of the race of long-horned oxen. But the con- 
sequence which I deduce from it is a perfectly grave one. 
Few operations of nature can have been more simple than the 
evolution of a horn. But if by the aid of these forces alone the 
operation must have been so complicated, involving indefinite 
eons of time, and the casual concurrence of multitudes of happy 
chances, for its accomplishment, what must we say of the period 
requisite for the production of the other peculiarities of the 
race of oxen ? What must we say of the infinitude of them, 
which must have been necessary for the production of all the 
complicated organisms and adaptations of animal life ? This 
philosophy affirms that the bodily, intellectual, and moral 
nature of the most highly gifted man has been slowly 
evolved by a few unintelligent forces in a long line of ancestry 
from a simple cell. Will it endeavour to compute the number 
of distinct species which must have been evolved in this long 
succession ; the number of eons which must have elapsed before 
each stage could have been accomplished? or the number of 
happy chances which must have concurred before each step 
could have become a possibility ? When it has done this, let 
it multiply these arrays of figures, which it is scarcely possible 
to embody in any finite conception, and present us with the 
result ? Surely this philosophy has stumbled on the regions of 
miracle without observing it. Far more miraculous is this 
mode of evolving the universe than the intervention of an 
intelligent Creator. 
