But there was yet a further criticism that was supposed by not a few to complete the discomfiture of those who still clung to the traditional beliefs. We can find it forcibly expressed in one of the earlier writings of Romanes, who in this case was endorsing the verdict of Mill. "Supposing the Deity to be {34} omnipotent, there can be no inference more transparent than that such wholesale suffering, for whatever ends designed, exhibits an incalculably greater deficiency of beneficence in the divine character than that which we know in any, the very worst, of human characters. For let us pause for one moment to think of what suffering in Nature means. Some hundreds of millions of years ago, some millions of millions of animals must be supposed to have become sentient. Since that time till the present there must have been millions and millions of generations of millions and millions of individuals. And throughout all this period of incalculable duration, this inconceivable host of sentient organisms have been in a state of unceasing battle, dread, ravin, pain. Looking to the outcome, we find that more than one-half of the species which have survived the ceaseless struggle are parasitic in their habits, lower and insentient forms of life feasting on higher and sentient forms; we find teeth and talons whetted for slaughter, hooks and suckers moulded for torment--everywhere a reign of terror, hunger, sickness, with oozing blood and quivering limbs, with gasping breath and eyes of innocence that dimly close in deaths of cruel torture!"[8] {35} Huxley, arguing to the same effect, concluded that "since thousands of times a minute, were our ears sharp enough, we should hear sighs and groans of pain like those heard by Dante at the gate of hell, the world cannot be governed by what we call benevolence."[9] Haeckel went so far as to propose to describe by the term "dysteleology" that part of the science of Biology which collected the facts that gave direct contradiction to the idea of beneficial "purposive arrangement."