LIFE ON THE EARTH. 203 



( It is interesting to contemplate an entangled 

 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 on 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 im- 

 plied by reproduction; variability from the indirect 

 and direct action of the extemal 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 charac- 

 ter, 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 con- 

 ceiving, 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 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 1 / 



1 Professor Sedgwick has communicated to the Cambridge 

 Philosophical Society an examination of the evidence bearing on 



