Against the special creation of mimicking species there are all the objections and difficulties in the way of special creation in other cases, with the addition of a few that are peculiar to it. The most obvious is, that we have gradations of mimicry and of protective resemblance--a fact which is strongly suggestive of a natural process having been at work. Another very serious objection is, that as mimicry has been shown to be useful only to those species and groups which are rare and probably dying out, and would cease to have any effect should the proportionate abundance of the two species be reversed, it follows that on the special-creation theory the one species must have been created plentiful, the other rare; and, notwithstanding the many causes that continually tend to alter the proportions of species, these two species must have always been specially maintained at their respective proportions, or the very purpose for which they each received their peculiar characteristics would have completely failed. A third difficulty is, that although it is very easy to understand how mimicry may be brought about by variation and the survival of the fittest, it seems a very strange thing for a Creator to protect an animal by making it imitate another, when the very assumption of a Creator implies his power to create it so as to require no such circuitous protection. These appear to be fatal objections to the application of the special-creation theory to this particular case. The other two supposed explanations, which may be shortly expressed as the theories of "similar conditions" and of "heredity," agree in making mimicry, where it exists, an adventitious circumstance not necessarily connected with the well-being of the mimicking species. But several of the most striking and most constant facts which have been adduced, directly contradict both those hypotheses. The law that mimicry is confined to a few groups only is one of these, for "similar conditions" must act more or less on all groups in a limited region, and "heredity" must influence all groups related to each other in an equal degree. Again, the general fact that those species which mimic others are rare, while those which are imitated are abundant, is in no way explained by either of these theories, any more than is the frequent occurrence of some palpable mode of protection in the imitated species. "Reversion to an ancestral type" no way explains why the imitator and the imitated always inhabit the very same district, whereas allied forms of every degree of nearness and remoteness generally inhabit different countries, and often different quarters of the globe; and neither it, nor "similar conditions," will account for the likeness between species of distinct groups being superficial only--a disguise, not a true resemblance; for the imitation of bark, of leaves, of sticks, of dung; for the resemblance between species in different orders, and even different