t not one living species will transmit its unaltered
likeness to a distant futurity. And of the species now living, very few
will transmit progeny of any kind to a far distant futurity; for the
manner in which all organic beings are grouped shows that the greater
number of species in each genus, and all the species in many genera,
have left no descendants, but have become utterly extinct. We can so far
take a prophetic glance into futurity as to foretell that it will be the
common and widely spread species, belonging to the larger and dominant
groups within each class, which will ultimately prevail and procreate
new and dominant species. As all the living forms of life are the lineal
descendants of those which lived long before the Cambrian epoch, we may
feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once
been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence
we may look with some confidence to a secure future of great length. And
as Natural Selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all
corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards
perfection.

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many
plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various
insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth,
and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different
from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner,
have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in
the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance, which
is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and
direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse: a
Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a
consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and
the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus from the war of nature, from
famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of
conceiving,--namely, the production of the higher animals,--directly
follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several
powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms
or into one; and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according
to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms
most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.

CREA