For it presupposes a purely blind, unintentional, “sieve-like” action, not merely as killing off the unfit—which is obvious—but as producing gradually increasing fitness, with no inherent power in the organism for adaptation. According to Darwinian Natural Selection, what works the change is a vast number of successive tiny differences such as always appear between parent and progeny. To turn out, for instance, the white bear of the Arctic from the general undifferentiated type of subfusc beardom you must have hardly perceptible steps beginning with the slightly lighter hue of a few bears, and proceeding gradually for æons and æons until only the pure white survived (though however one could get at _pure_ white by such a process it would have puzzled them to say!) Natural Selection, then, imperatively demands for each species a slow ascension, a regular, inclined plane, produced over a prodigious space of time, in which the animal is getting whiter and whiter, or fleeter and fleeter, or what not, by infinitesimal degrees. The theory of Natural Selection necessitates the presence, in all fossils, and even during any considerable historical period, of increasing progressive slight differences in type. It is no good saying that Natural Selection might apply to new highly suitable variations coming at exactly the right moment to benefit the animal. Such variations indicate Design of some sort and Will. If the climate gets colder and very woolly types of an animal immediately begin to appear, that is not Natural Selection; that is a startling but obvious adaptation, due to some other cause, of organism to environment. It is the very negation of a blind, causeless, undefined, unwilled process which the theory of Natural Selection was intended to bolster up. (3) Again, Natural Selection implies advance by the killing off of the organism not possessed of a specific advantage. How is it then that organisms not possessed of the advantage survive—as they certainly do—side by side with the advantaged and in the same environment? The Elephant’s trunk grew longer because the short-trunkites were killed off. What of the Tapir? (4) Again, Natural Selection cannot allow itself to be ousted by any rival aid to development. This is a very important point. The whole point of Natural Selection as the explanation of the difference between living beings is that it is mechanical. The moment you have to prop it up by saying “Animals with similar variations will tend to mate one with the other,” or “Striking change in environment will tend to produce corresponding variations,” you are abandoning Natural Selection, and covering up your retreat with mere verbiage. Why “tend”?