This comes to saying that, if there was no power in nature which operates so that of all the many fluctuating variations, those only are preserved which tend to the resemblance which is beneficial to the creature, then indeed there would be difficulty in understanding how the resemblance could have come about; but that as there is a beneficial resemblance to start with, and as there is a power in nature which would preserve and accumulate further beneficial resemblance, should it arise from this cause or that, the difficulty is removed. But Mr. Mivart does not, I take it, deny the existence of such a power in nature, as Mr. Darwin supposes, though, if I understand him rightly, he does not see that its operation _upon small fortuitous variations_ is at all the simple and obvious process, which on a superficial view of the case it would appear to be. He thinks—and I believe the reader will agree with him—that this process is too slow and too risky. What he wants to know is, how the insect came even rudely to resemble the object, and how, if its variations are indefinite, we are ever to get into such a condition as to be able to report progress, owing to the constant liability of the creature which has varied favourably, to play the part of Penelope and undo its work, by varying in some one of the infinite number of other directions which are open to it—all of which, except this one, tend to destroy the resemblance, and yet may be in some other respect even more advantageous to the creature, and so tend to its preservation. Moreover, here, too, I think (though I cannot be sure), we have a recurrence of the original fallacy in the words—“If we were to account for the above resemblances, independently of ‘natural selection,’ through mere fluctuating variability.” Surely Mr. Darwin does, after all, “account for the resemblances through mere fluctuating variability,” for “natural selection” does not account for one single variation in the whole list of them from first to last, other than indirectly, as shewn in the preceding chapter.