exhibits the stored-up results of change, till
the varied and finished forms--some reptile, some bird, some
animal--which we now see around us, have been produced. And at last man
himself was developed in the same way. All this, observe, is by the
action of just such ordinary and natural causes as we now see operating
around us--changes in food and in climate, changes in one part requiring
a corresponding change in others, and so on.

[Footnote 1: The reader may find this admirably put in Wallace,
"Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection," p. 302.]

Nature contains no sharply drawn lines. Plants are different from
animals; but there are animals so low down in the scale of life that it
is difficult to distinguish them from plants. Pigeons are distinct from
pheasants, but the line at which the one species ends and the other
begins is difficult to draw. This fact seems to invite some theory of
one form changing into other. Accordingly the evolutionist explains the
working of the process which he asserts to be sufficient to produce all
the various forms of life in our globe.

After stating this more in detail than we have previously done, we shall
be in a better position to judge if the process (which in the main we
have no desire to deny or even to question) can dispense with _guidance_
and the fixing of certain lines and limits within which, and of certain
types towards which, the development proceeds. That is our point.

It is hardly necessary to illustrate the enormous destruction of life
which goes on in the world. Even among the human race, the percentage of
infants that die in the first months of their life is very large. But in
the lower forms of life it is truly enormous. Only consider the myriads
of insects that perish from hunger or accident, and from the preying of
one species on another. If it were not so, the world would be overrun by
plagues of mice, of birds, of insects of all kinds, and indeed by
creatures of every grade. The term "struggle for existence" is, then,
not an inapt one. All forms of living creatures have to contend with
enemies which seek to prey upon or to destroy them, with the difficulty
of obtaining food, and with what I may call the chances of
nature--cold, storms, floods, disease, and so forth.

Now, it is obvious that if some creatures of a given kind possess some
accidental peculiarity or modification in their formation which gives
them (in one way or another) an advantag