If there were a series of created types, there may naturally have been what I may call sub-types; which would be certain well-marked stages on the way to the final form.  Such sub-type forms would naturally occur at different ages, and being marked would show their place in the scale, and their connection with the ultimate perfect form.  Such a possibility would exactly account for the series of Eohippus, Hipparion, and horse, which we have already instanced; and still more so for the rise and disappearance of the great Mesozoic Saurians when their object was fulfilled.  Deny guidance and type, and everything becomes confused.  Why should variation take certain directions? how comes it that natural forces and conditions of life so occur and co-operate as to produce the variety of changes needed?

And there is also one other general objection which I desire to state.

Why should development have gone in different directions towards the same object?  I grant that different circumstances would produce different changes, but not for the same purpose.  For example take eye-sight.  The world shows several types of eye.  The insect eye quite unlike any other; the crustacean eye also distinct; and birds, fishes, and animals having an eye which is generally similar and is somewhat imitated by the eye of the cuttle fish (which is not a fish, but a cephalopod).

Again, granted that poison is a useful defence to creatures:  how is it given so differently?—­to a serpent in the tooth; to a bee or a scorpion in the tail; to a spider in a specially adapted antenna, and to the centipede in a pair of modified legs on the thorax.

One would have supposed that natural causes tending to produce poison weapons would have all gone on the same lines.  And, curiously, in some few cases, we have a sameness of line.  About twelve species—­all fish—­have an electric apparatus, familiar to most of us in the flat sea-fish called Torpedo and in the fresh-water eel called Gymnotus.  The only answer the anti-creationist can give to this dissimilarity of development is that there are many vacant places in the polity of nature, and that development takes place in that direction which fits the creature to occupy a vacant place, and is, therefore, diverse.

It seems to me that this—­the only answer that can he given—­is necessarily a modified form or mode of creation. How can natural causes know anything about a polity of nature and a vacant place, here and there, so that the creature must develop in one way or another to fill it?

Another set of cases is the production of similar functional results by most diverse means, as in the case of flying animals, birds, pterodactyles, and bats; here there is a widely different modification of the fore-arm and other bones, all for the same purpose.  The reader will do well to refer to Mr. Mivart’s book on this subject.