474 CONCLUSION. 



real and mental endowments will tend to progress towara 

 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 repro- 

 duction ; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduc- 

 tion: Variabilitv 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 fol- 

 lows. There is grandeur in this view of life with its sev- 

 eral 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. 



