We know from fossils, that species have remained entirely unaltered since the glacial epochs began, and how many generations are included even in that!  If no change is visible in all that time, how many more ages must have elapsed before a primitive Amoeba could have developed into a bird or a Mammal?

In Florida Mr. Agassiz has shown that coral insects exist unchanged, and must have been so for 30,000 years.

When we remember also the enormous destruction of life that takes place, supposing that in a given form a few creatures underwent accidental changes which were beneficial and likely to aid them—­still what chances were there that the creatures which began to exhibit the right sort of change should have died before they left offspring! the chances against them are enormous:  and the chances have to be repeated at every successive change before the finally perfected or advanced creature took its place in the polity of nature.  Moreover, there is the chance of small changes being lost by intercrossing:  our own cattle-breeders have most carefully to select the parents, or else the favourable variety soon disappears.

How then, seeing the power of stability which at least some forms are found to exhibit—­seeing too the enormous chances against the survival of the particular specimens that begin to vary, and the further chances of the loss of variety by intercrossing; how can we get the millions of millions of years necessary to produce the present extreme divergence of species?  The fact is that the force of this objection is likely to be undervalued, from the mere difficulty of bringing home to the mind the immeasurable time really demanded by uncontrolled evolution.

Nor is the question of time left absolutely to be matter of belief or speculation.  For here and there in the geological records of the rocks, we have certain intermediate forms—­or forms which we may fairly argue to be such.  But looking at the very considerable differences between the earlier and the later of these forms—­differences greater than those which now separate well-defined species, it seems questionable whether any of the divisions of Tertiary time, taking all the circumstances into consideration, could be lengthened out sufficiently to accomplish the change.

At any rate, if any particular example be disallowed, the general objection must be admitted to be weighty.

Now the intervention of any system of created designs of animal form—­however little its details be understood—­and the production of variations under divine guidance which would lead more directly to the accomplishment of such forms as the complicated flowers of orchids above described, would unquestionably tend to shorten the requisite time.  There would, by a process of reasoning easily followed, be an immediate reduction of the ages required, within practicable limits, though the time must still remain long.  More than that is not necessary.  The