continue itself and may fulfill the purposes of its existence, we may without any difficulty trace an obvious reason for the permission that has been given to such destruction of individual life. When to the sum total of happiness and benefit which this permission bestows on each of the orders of the inferior animals according to its capacity for enjoyment, whether it does or does not enter into the food of man, whether it comes or never comes within the reach of his arm, we add the sum total of happiness and benefit which this law of universal destruction bestows on man, so far as he avails himself of it, we shall find no reason to impeach the Divine Goodness or to adopt a conclusion derogatory to the Infinite Power. We may dismiss the difficulty that is supposed to arise from the warfare of the superior upon the inferior beings, because that warfare, when we trace it through all its stages, involves no sort of deduction from the perfect character of the Divine Goodness or the Divine Power. Next, we come to the liability of animals, man included, to be preyed upon by parasites, creatures of a very inferior order when compared to the animals which they infest. I have looked in vain through Mr. Spencer's speculations for any explanation which makes the existence of the parasitic animals a support to the theory of evolution without involving the same impeachment of the Divine Power or the Divine Goodness which is supposed to be involved in the hypothesis of special creations. We are indeed told that evolution brings about an increasing amount of happiness, all evils being but incidental; that, applying alike to the lowest and to the highest forms of organization, there is in all cases a progressive adaptation, and a survival of the fittest. "If," it is argued, "in the uniform working of the process, there are evolved organisms of low types, which prey on those of higher types, the evils inflicted form but a deduction from the average benefits. The universal and necessary tendency toward supremacy and multiplication of the best, applying to the organic creation as a whole as well as to each species, is ever diminishing the damage done, tends ever to maintain those most superior organizations which, in one way or another, escape the invasions of the inferior, and so tends to produce a type less liable to the invasions of the inferior. Thus the evils accompanying evolution are ever being self-eliminated."[66]