aid them--still what chances
were there that the creatures which began to exhibit the right sort of
change should have died before they left offspring! the chances against
them are enormous: and the chances have to be repeated at every
successive change before the finally perfected or advanced creature took
its place in the polity of nature. Moreover, there is the chance of
small changes being lost by intercrossing: our own cattle-breeders have
most carefully to select the parents, or else the favourable variety
soon disappears.

How then, seeing the power of stability which at least some forms are
found to exhibit--seeing too the enormous chances against the survival
of the particular specimens that begin to vary, and the further chances
of the loss of variety by intercrossing; how can we get the millions of
millions of years necessary to produce the present extreme divergence of
species? The fact is that the force of this objection is likely to be
undervalued, from the mere difficulty of bringing home to the mind the
immeasurable time really demanded by uncontrolled evolution.

Nor is the question of time left absolutely to be matter of belief or
speculation. For here and there in the geological records of the rocks,
we _have_ certain intermediate forms--or forms which we may fairly argue
to be such. But looking at the very considerable differences between the
earlier and the later of these forms--differences greater than those
which now separate well-defined species, it seems questionable whether
any of the divisions of Tertiary time, taking all the circumstances into
consideration, could be lengthened out sufficiently to accomplish the
change.

At any rate, if any particular example be disallowed, the general
objection must be admitted to be weighty.

Now the intervention of any system of created designs of animal
form--however little its details be understood--and the production of
variations under _divine guidance_ which would lead more directly to the
accomplishment of such forms as the complicated flowers of orchids above
described, would unquestionably tend to shorten the requisite time.
There would, by a process of reasoning easily followed, be an immediate
reduction of the ages required, within practicable limits, though the
time must still remain long. More than that is not necessary. The
Ussherian chronology is not of Divine revelation, though some persons
speak of it as if it was. There is not the shad