ot 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 of each genus, and all the species of many
genera, have left no descendants, but have become utterly extinct. We
can so far take a prophetic glance into futurity as to foretel that it
will be the common and widely-spread species, belonging to the larger
and dominant groups, 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 Silurian 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 equally
inappreciable 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 an entangled 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 on 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 external 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 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.

INDEX.

A