52 CONCLUSION 



incalculable waste of eggs and pollen. From death, 

 famine, rapine, and the concealed war of nature we 

 can see that the highest good, which we can con- 

 ceive, the creation of the higher animals has directly 

 come. Doubtless it at first transcends our humble 

 powers, to conceive laws capable of creating in- 

 dividual organisms, each characterised by the most 

 exquisite workmanship and widely- extended adap- 

 tations. It accords better with [our modesty] the 

 lowness of our faculties to suppose each must require 

 the fiat of a creator, but in the same proportion the 

 existence of such laws should exalt our notion of 

 the power of the omniscient Creator 1 . There is a 

 simple grandeur in the view of life with its powers 

 of growth, assimilation and reproduction, being 

 originally breathed into matter under one or a 

 few forms, and that whilst this our planet has gone 

 circling on according to fixed laws, and land and 

 water, in a cycle of change, have gone on replacing 

 each other, that from so simple an origin, through 

 the process of gradual selection of infinitesimal 

 changes, endless forms most beautiful and most 

 wonderful have been evolved 2 . 



1 The following discussion, together with some memoranda are on the 

 last page of the MS. " The supposed creative spirit does not create either 

 number or kind which (are) from analogy adapted to site (viz. New Zealand) : 

 it does not keep them all permanently adapted to any country, it works on 

 spots or areas of creation, it is not persistent for great periods, it creates 

 forms of same groups in same regions, with no physical similarity, it 

 creates, on islands or mountain summits, species allied to the neighbouring 

 ones, and not allied to alpine nature as shown in other mountain summits 

 even different on different island of similarly constituted archipelago, not 

 created on two points : never mammifers created on small isolated island ; 

 nor number of organisms adapted to locality : its power seems influenced or 

 related to the range of other species wholly distinct of the same genus, it 

 does not equally effect, in amount of difference, all the groups of the same 

 class." 



2 This passage is the ancestor of the concluding words in the first edition 

 of the Origin of Species which have remained substantially unchanged 

 throughout subsequent editions, "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 



