Chap. VI. 
SUMMAEY. 
203 
young queens her daughters as soon as born, or to 
perish herself in the combat; for undoubtedly this is 
for the good of the community; and maternal love or 
maternal hatred, though the latter fortunately is most 
rare, is all the same to the inexorable principle of 
natural selection. If we admire the several ingenious 
contrivances, by which the flowers of the orchis and of 
many other plants are fertilised through insect agency, 
can we consider as equally perfect the elaboration by 
our flr-trees of dense clouds of pollen, in order that a 
few granules may be wafted by a chance breeze on to 
the ovules ? 
Summary of Chapter .—We have in this chapter dis¬ 
cussed some of the difficulties and objections which may 
be urged against my theory. Many of them are very 
serious; but I think that in the discussion light has been 
thrown on several facts, which on the theory of inde¬ 
pendent acts of creation are utterly obscure. We have 
seen that species at any one period are not indefinitely 
variable, and are not linked together by a multitude 
of intermediate gradations, partly because the process of 
natural selection will always be very slow, and will act, 
at any one time, only on a very few forms; and partly 
because the very process of natural selection almost 
implies the continual supplanting and extinction of pre¬ 
ceding and intermediate gradations. Closely allied spe¬ 
cies, now living on a continuous area, must often have 
been formed when the area was not continuous, and 
when the conditions of life did not insensibly graduate 
away from one part to another. When two varieties 
are formed in two districts of a continuous area, an in¬ 
termediate varietv will often be formed, fitted for an 
intermediate zone; but from reasons assigned, the inter¬ 
mediate variety will usually exist in lesser numbers than 
