476 



ANIMAL BIOLOGY 



"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 re- 

 production; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the 



Fig. 312. — Charles Darwin. 



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 ani- 

 mals, directly follows. There is a 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." 



