ome
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. We may look with some
confidence to a secure future of great length. 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.

SIR HUMPHRY DAVY

Elements of Chemical Philosophy

Humphry Davy, the celebrated natural philosopher, was born Dec. 17,
1778, at Penzance, England. At the age of seventeen he became an
apothecary's apprentice, and at the age of nineteen assistant at
Dr. Beddoes's pneumatic institution at Bristol. During researches
at the pneumatic institution he disco