If you say that it is incredible that natural selection can account for the production of such a wonderful thing as the mind of man--his "reasonable soul," the reply is that instinct varies among the inferior animals no less than physical structure, and though there may be no perceivable proportion or gradation between structural variation and variation of instinct; still, if the fact is admitted that among animals instinct varies, then it is easy to conceive that some of those variations may be favorable, and if favorable then natural selection would perpetuate them and make them dominant. From this basis they make another step the difference between the mental faculties of man and animal is immense, but the high culture which belongs to man evolutionists maintain has been slowly developed, and the separation between the mental powers of lowest man and the highest ape is no greater than that which exists between the lowest ape and some of the lower forms of life, say the Zoophytes. If you say that articulate language surely marks a wide gulf between man and the lower animals, the reply is that animals are not devoid of expedients for expressing emotions, and from those expedients may have been evolved through intermediate species, now extinct, articulate language. If you ask why, if species have descended from other species by fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion, instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined? The answer is that the intermediate species have become extinct, that we must look upon each existing species as having descended from some unknown forms; that natural selection acts slowly by preserving profitable modifications. "Each new form will tend in a fully stocked country to take the place of, and finally exterminate, its own less-improved parent form, and other less favored forms with which it comes in competition; thus both parent and all transitional varieties will generally have been exterminated by the very process of the formation and perfection of the new."[D] [Footnote D: Origin of species, p 134.] If you object further, and call attention to the fact that in the great geological record, of which evolutionists boast so much, that not even in that can be found the intermediate transitional forms that should, according to their theory, link together by fine gradations the species[E]--this objection, otherwise fatal to the theory of evolution, is avoided rather than answered by putting forth the claim that the geological record is very imperfect, and comparatively only a few of its pages have, as yet, been read by man.