But as soon as an organ becomes useless, the continued selection of individuals in which it is best developed must cease, and a process which I have termed _panmixia_ takes place. When this process is in operation, not only those individuals with the best-developed organs have the chance of reproducing themselves, but also those individuals in which the organs are less well-developed. Hence follows a mixture of all possible degrees of perfection, which must in the course of time result in the deterioration of the average development of the organ. Thus a species which has retired into dark caverns must necessarily come to gradually possess less developed powers of vision; for defects in the structure of the eyes, which occur in consequence of individual variability, are not eliminated by natural selection, but may be transmitted and fixed in the descendants[194]. This result is all the more likely to happen, inasmuch as other organs which are of importance for the life of the species will gain what the functionless organ loses in size and nutrition. As at each stage of retrogressive transformation individual fluctuations always occur, a continued decline from the original degree of development will inevitably, although very slowly, take place, until the last remnant finally disappears. How inconceivably slowly this process goes on is shown by the numerous cases of rudimentary organs: by the above-mentioned embryonic sixth finger of man, or by the hind limbs of whales buried beneath the surface of the body, or by their embryonic tooth-germs. I believe that the very slowness with which functionless organs gradually disappear, agrees much better with my theory than with the one which has been hitherto held. The result of the disuse of an organ is considerable, even in the course of a single individual life, and if only a small fraction of such a result were transmitted to the descendants, the organ would be necessarily reduced to a minimum, in a hundred or at any rate in a thousand generations. But how many millions of generations may have elapsed since e. g. the teeth of the whalebone whales became useless, and were replaced by whalebone! We do not know the actual number of years, but we know that the whole material of the tertiary rocks has been derived from the older strata, deposited in the sea, elevated, and has been itself largely removed by denudation, since that time.