g, slender fingers, would be helpless,
and would perish. There is no middle ground. If the ancestor of the bat
was a terrestrial creature, with limbs fitted for walking, then it must
have given birth to a full-fledged bat, fitted for flying. There could
have been no middle stage, for such a creature would have been helpless,
and must have perished.

All this applies with equal force to the diversified and often highly
complex structure of plants. As the organs of the various plants are now
constituted, they most admirably serve their purpose. Given a slight
change, an underdevelopment, and the individual would perish. But such
underdeveloped stages must have occurred in the history of every
life-form on earth, if a change through slow adaptations is to be
accepted as a hypothesis to account for their present form. To our mind,
this matter of rudimentary structures presents an insuperable obstacle
to acceptance of the evolutionary hypothesis even on scientific grounds.

CHAPTER SIX.
Instinct.

How the various instincts of animals, the homing instinct of birds and
insects, the building instincts, the migrating instinct, etc., could
have been developed though forces working by natural selection or any
other law, is a question which has called forth much discussion. It
cannot be said that the explanations contained in the pages of Darwin,
Romanes, and Spencer are satisfying. The difficulty that remains
unsolved is similar to that (already considered) of rudimentary
structures. On instinct depends the existence of most animals.
According to the theory these instincts have been developed by slow
degrees. Hence there must have been a time when these instincts,
because not yet completely developed, were useless to the animal. But
if useless, the animal must have perished. The strength of this
objection to the evolutionary hypothesis will become clear from a brief
study of the manner in which animal life is bound up with the proper
functioning of instinct.

Consider, for instance, the dependence of the honey bee and her hive on
the functions, every one instinctive, of queen, workers, and drones.
There is the queen, whose sole work is to lay eggs; the drones, or
males, whose function it is to fertilize the queen; and the workers,
which are females undeveloped sexually. In these three kinds of
individuals we see a combination of many most remarkable instincts and
peculiarities of structure which look to the good of the comm