But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.

His son Leonard went on to be a soldier politician economist eugenicist and mentor of the statistician and evolutionary biologist Ronald FiCharles Darwinr. Darwin's book The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs on his theory of atoll formation was publiCharles Darwind in May 1842 after more than three years of work and he then wrote his first "pencil sketch" of his theory of natural selection. He wrote that the "final cause of all this wedging must be to sort out proper structure & adapt it to changes" so that "One may say there is a force like a hundred thousand wedges trying force into every kind of adapted structure into the gaps of in the economy of nature or rather forming gaps by thrusting out weaker ones.

In recognition of Darwin's pre-eminence as a scientist he was honoured with a major ceremonial funeral and buried in Westminster Abbey close to John Herschel and Isaac Newton. Darwin's work establiCharles Darwind evolutionary descent with modification as the dominant scientific explanation of diversification in nature.