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[top left corner damaged]
[pencil insertion by Litchfield:] Origin of Species

(202

Sect VI. Transitional habits

instead of in swamps; that there should be wood-peckers, & I may add tree-frogs, where there is not a wood tree; that there should be diving thrushes, & petrels with all the habits of an auks.

Organs of extreme perfection & complication. — To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances, for unconsciously adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light & for the correction of spherical & chromatic aberrations, could have been formed by natural selection, is seems, I freely confess absurd in the highest possible degree. The accumulation of infinitely many slight variations

Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations can be from a perfect & complex eye to one very imperfect & simple, — each grade being useful to its possessor—, if we can be shown to exist or will to have existed or was now to exist; if, further, the eye does ever vary ever so slightly & the variations can ever could be inherited (which and it which is certain that they can be ) & may be useful under changing might if any variation or modification in the organ could ever be useful to an organism be under changing conditions of life all to each [illeg] possessor, then this the difficulty must be considered of believing that a perfect & complex eye might be formed by natural selection, though insuperable in by to our imagination, can hardly be considered real.) (In looking for gradations in any structure, we ought to look to

[202v]

[in the hand of Henrietta Litchfield:]

To Dr Bonnefoy from H.E. Litchfield Feb 21. 1905

a page of my father's manuscript of the "Origin of Species."