446 Life and Immortality. 



of an equally secure and inappreciably enduring earth-life. 

 And as Natural Selection operates solely by and for the good 

 of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will 

 tend to progress toward perfection. 



When we contemplate a tangled bank, with innumerable 

 plants of diverse kinds, and many-voiced birds singing in 

 concert, or waging destruction on manifold insects that are 

 flitting about, or the long, slimy worm that has come up 

 from its underground retreat, we are lost in wonder and 

 admiration, and can only reflect that these elaborately con- 

 structed forms, so different from each other, and so strangely 

 and intricately dependent on each other, have all been 

 evolved by laws that act all around us. These are the laws 

 of Growth with Reproduction ; Inheritance, which is almost 

 implied by reproduction ; Variability from the action, direct 

 and indirect, of the conditions of life, and from use and dis- 

 use ; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for 

 Existence, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, or Sur- 

 vival of the Fittest, entailing thereby Divergence of Charac- 

 ter and the Extinction of less-improved forms. And thus, 

 from the war of nature, and from famine and death, have 

 arisen the higher mammalia, in which man, the summa sum- 

 marum of life, is included. He occupies the summit, toward 

 which the efforts of millions of buried ages seem to have 

 been tending. There is a grandeur in this view of life, with 

 its several powers, originally breathed, by the operation of 

 the natural laws, into one or a few forms of life, and that, 

 while the earth, in obedience to the fixed principle of gravi- 

 tation, has gone cycling on, endless forms, most beautiful 

 and most wonderful, have been, and are being, evolved from 

 so simple a beginning. 



While thus it has been shown that life has been progress- 

 ive, successive forms of life being the result of modification 

 through descent, those faring the best in the Struggle for 

 Existence surviving, by reason of some advantage, physical 

 or otherwise, gained over their competitors, yet little, bearing 



