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 toward 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, while this planet has gone circling 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Vestigial_ is now preferred to _rudimentary_ as a term.--Ed.

HOW "THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES" CAME TO BE WRITTEN.

[An extract from the autobiography of Charles Darwin, in "The
Life and Letters of Charles Darwin," New York, D. Appleton &
Co.]

From September, 1854, I devoted my whole time to arranging my huge pile
of notes, to observing and to experimenting in relation to the