That minute, fortuitous, and indefinite variations could have brought about such special forms and modifications as have been enumerated in this chapter, seems to contradict not imagination, but reason.

[Page 62] That either many individuals amongst a species of butterfly should be simultaneously preserved through a similar accidental and minute variation in one definite direction, when variations in many other directions would also preserve; or that one or two so varying should succeed in supplanting the progeny of thousands of other individuals, and that this should by no other cause be carried so far as to produce the appearance (as we have before stated) of spots of fungi, &c .-- are alternatives of an improbability so extreme as to be practically equal to impossibility.
In spite of all the resources of a fertile imagination, the Darwinian, pure and simple, is reduced to the assertion of a paradox as great as any he opposes.

In the place of a mere assertion of our ignorance as to the way these phenomena have been produced, he brings forward, as their explanation, a cause which it is contended in this work is demonstrably insufficient.
Of course in this matter, as elsewhere throughout nature, we have to do with the operation of fixed and constant natural laws, and the knowledge of these may before long be obtained by human patience or human genius; but there is, it is believed, already enough evidence to show that these as yet unknown natural laws or law will never be resolved into the action of "Natural Selection," but will constitute or exemplify a mode and condition of organic action of which the Darwinian theory takes no account whatsoever.

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