A false supposition, when the consequences proceeding from it are followed further and further, will sooner or later lead to absurdities and palpable contradictions. During the period of tormenting doubt—and this was by no means a short one—when the pointer of the scales oscillated before me in perfect uncertainty between the _pro_ and the _con_, and when any fact leading to a quick decision would have been most welcome to me, I took no small pains to detect some such contradictions among the inferences as to the class of Crustacea furnished by the Darwinian theory. But I found none, either then, or subsequently. Those which I thought I had found were dispelled on closer consideration, or actually became converted into supports for Darwin’s theory. Nor, so far as I am aware, have any of the _necessary_ consequences of Darwin’s hypotheses been proved by any one else, to stand in clear and irreconcilable contradiction. And yet, as the most profound students of the animal kingdom are amongst Darwin’s opponents, it would seem that it ought to have been an easy matter for them to crush him long since beneath a mass of absurd and contradictory inferences, if any such were to be drawn from his theory. To this want of demonstrated contradictions I think we may ascribe just the same importance in Darwin’s favour, that his opponents have attributed to the absence of demonstrated intermediate forms between the species of the various strata of the earth. Independently of the reasons which Darwin gives for the preservation of such intermediate forms being only exceptional, this last mentioned circumstance will not be regarded as of very great significance by any one who has traced the development of an animal upon larvae fished from the sea, and had to seek in vain for months, and even years, for those transitional forms, which he nevertheless knew to be swarming around him in thousands. A few examples may show how contradictions might come forth as necessary results of the Darwinian hypotheses.