Then, losing its eyes, legs, and antennae, and {47} becoming rudimentary, it sinks into an ordinary grub-like form, and feeds on honey, ultimately undergoing another transformation, re-acquiring its legs, &c., and emerging a perfect beetle! That such a process should have arisen by the accumulation of minute accidental variations in structure and habit, appears to many minds, quite competent to form an opinion on the subject, absolutely incredible.
It may be objected, perhaps, that these difficulties are _difficulties of ignorance_--that we cannot explain them because we do not know _enough_ of the animals.

But it is here contended that this is not the case; it is not that we merely fail to see how Natural Selection acted, but that there is a positive incompatibility between the cause assigned and the results.

It will be stated shortly what wonderful instances of co-ordination and of unexpected utility Mr.Darwin has discovered in orchids.

The discoveries are not disputed or undervalued, but the explanation of their _origin_ is deemed thoroughly unsatisfactory--utterly insufficient to explain the incipient, infinitesimal beginnings of structures which are of utility only when they are considerably developed.
Let us consider the mammary gland, or breast.

Is it conceivable that the young of any animal was ever saved from destruction by accidentally sucking a drop of scarcely nutritious fluid from an accidentally hypertrophied cutaneous gland of its mother?
And even if one was so, what chance was there of the perpetuation of such a variation?
On the hypothesis of Natural Selection itself, we must assume that up to that time the race had been well adapted to the surrounding conditions; the temporary and accidental trial and change of conditions, which caused the so-sucking young one to be the "fittest to survive" under the supposed circumstances, would soon cease to act, and then the progeny of the mother, with the accidentally hypertrophied, sebaceous glands, would have no tendency to survive the {48} far outnumbering descendants of the normal ancestral form.