groups, all within a few great classes, which we now see everywhere around
us, and which has prevailed throughout all time. This grand fact of the
grouping of all organic beings seems to me utterly inexplicable on the
theory of creation.

As natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight, successive,
favourable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modification; it
can act only by very short and slow steps. Hence the canon of "Natura non
facit saltum," which every fresh addition to our knowledge tends to make
truer, is on this theory simply intelligible. We can plainly see why nature
is prodigal in variety, though niggard in innovation. But why this should
be a law of nature if each species has been independently created, no man
can explain.

Many other facts are, as it seems to me, explicable on this theory. How
strange it is that a bird, under the form of woodpecker, should have been
created to prey on insects on the ground; that upland geese, which never or
rarely swim, should have been created with webbed feet; that a thrush
should have been created to dive and feed on sub-aquatic insects; and that
a petrel should have been created with habits and structure fitting it for
the life of an auk or grebe! and so on in endless other cases. But on the
view of each {472} species constantly trying to increase in number, with
natural selection always ready to adapt the slowly varying descendants of
each to any unoccupied or ill-occupied place in nature, these facts cease
to be strange, or perhaps might even have been anticipated.

As natural selection acts by competition, it adapts the inhabitants of each
country only in relation to the degree of perfection of their associates;
so that we need feel no surprise at the inhabitants of any one country,
although on the ordinary view supposed to have been specially created and
adapted for that country, being beaten and supplanted by the naturalised
productions from another land. Nor ought we to marvel if all the
contrivances in nature be not, as far as we can judge, absolutely perfect;
and if some of them be abhorrent to our ideas of fitness. We need not
marvel at the sting of the bee causing the bee's own death; at drones being
produced in such vast numbers for one single act, with the great majority
slaughtered by their sterile sisters; at the astonishing waste of pollen by
our fir-trees; at the instinctive hatred of the queen bee for her own
fertile daughters; a