But where are these links to be found? and what naturalist can discover them? If the theory be true, the process must still be going on, and the world must be teeming with these intermediate races. But where are they? Bishop Temple as attempted to answer this question thus: If it be asked why this variety does not range by imperceptible degrees from extreme forms in one direction to extreme forms in the other, the answer is to be found in the enormous prodigality, and the equally enormous waste of life and living creatures . . . Eggs, and seeds, and germs are destroyed by millions, and so in a less but still enormous proportion are the young that come from those that have not been destroyed. There is no waste like the waste of life that is to be seen in nature . . . The inevitable operation of this waste, as Darwin’s investigation showed, has been to destroy all those varieties which were not well fitted to their surroundings, and to keep those that were. (P. 165.) But if this be the solution of the difficulty, how is it that those at the bottom of the scale remain? One of the great principle employed to explain the theory is “the survival of the fittest.” The result therefore must be continuous progress, and the _raison d’être_ of each successive formation is its superior fitness above the form from which it sprang. A1 survives because it is superior in fitness to A, and A2 because it is superior to A1, and so forth. The effect therefore of the Bishop’s principle would be that the inferior forms at the bottom of the scale would perish, while the superior that have risen out of them, by reason of their greater adaptation to their environment, would survive. But this is not the fact. As a matter of fact, A, at the bottom of the scale, survives, though A99, at the top, is gone. The countless multitude of intermediate formations has disappeared, but the parent stock remains. If ever there was a race of animals so near man as to render it nothing more than natural that it should give birth to man, that race has wholly disappeared, while animals vastly inferior still exist in all their strength. Such a fact appears to me to be fatal to the theory.