The grain will only turn the scales when these are very nicely balanced, and an advantage in numbers counts for weight, even as an advantage in structure.

As the numbers of the favoured variety diminish, so must its relative advantages increase, if the chance of its existence is to surpass the chance of its extinction, until hardly any conceivable advantage would enable the descendants of a single pair to exterminate the descendants of many thousands if they and their descendants are supposed to breed freely with the inferior variety, and so gradually lose their ascendency." Mr.Darwin himself says of the article quoted: "The justice of these remarks cannot, I think, be disputed.

If, for instance, a bird of some {60} kind could procure its food more easily by having its beak curved, and if one were born with its beak strongly curved, and which consequently flourished, nevertheless there would be a very poor chance of this one individual perpetuating its kind to the exclusion of the common form." This admission seems almost to amount to a change of front in the face of the enemy! These remarks have been quoted at length because they so greatly intensify the difficulties brought forward in this chapter.

If the most favourable variations have to contend with such difficulties, what must be thought as to the chance of preservation of the slightly displaced eye in a sole or of the incipient development of baleen in a whale?
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION.
It has been here contended that a certain few facts, out of many which might have been brought forward, are inconsistent with the origination of species by "Natural Selection" only or mainly.
Mr.Darwin's theory requires minute, indefinite, fortuitous variations of all parts in all directions, and he insists that the sole operation of "Natural Selection" upon such is sufficient to account for the great majority of organic forms, with their most complicated structures, intricate mutual adaptations and delicate adjustments.
To this conception has been opposed the difficulties presented by such a structure as the form of the giraffe, which ought not to have been the solitary structure it is; also the minute beginnings and the last refinements of protective mimicry equally difficult or rather impossible to account for by "Natural Selection." Again the difficulty as to the heads of flat-fishes has been insisted on, as also the origin, and at the same time the constancy, of the limbs of the highest animals.

Reference has also been made to the whalebone of whales, and to the impossibility of {61} understanding its origin through "Natural Selection" only; the same as regards the infant kangaroo, with its singular deficiency of power compensated for by maternal structures on the one hand, to which its own breathing organs bear direct relation on the other.