(Eccles. iii II).]

(5) Lastly, that there is no possibility of giving _time_ enough on any
possible theory of the world's existence, for the evolution of all
species, unless _some_ reasonable theory of creative arrangement and
design be admitted.

The great objection--the descent of man and the introduction of reason,
consciousness, and so forth, into the world, will then form two separate
chapters, concluding the first division of my subject.

There is one point which the reader may be surprised to see omitted. It
is, that if these slow changes were always going on, why is not the
present world full of, and the fossil-bearing rocks also abounding in,
_intermediate forms_, creatures which _are on their way_ to being
something else? But there are reasons to be given on this ground which
make the subject a less definite one for treatment. It is said, for
example, that in the fossil rocks we have only such scanty and
fragmentary records, that it is not possible to draw a complete
inference, and that there is always the possibility of fresh discoveries
being made. Such discoveries have, it is asserted, already been made in
the miocene and again in later rocks; different species of an early form
of _horse_ which are (and this we may admit) the ancestral or
intermediate forms of our own horse, have been found. I therefore would
not press the difficulty, great as it is, because of the escape which
the hope of future discovery always affords. I will take this
opportunity to repeat that in this chapter I say nothing about the
difficulty which arises from the introduction of elementary reason or
instinct, and of consciousness, into the scale of organic being; that
will more appropriately fall in with the consideration of the