604 OONCLUSIOm 



In the future T see open fields for far more important 

 researches. Phychologj will be securely based on the 

 foundation already well laid by Mr. Herbert Spencer, that 

 of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and 

 capacity by gradation. Much light will be thrown on the 

 origin of man and his history. 



Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied 

 with the view that each species has been independently 

 created. To my mind it accords better with what we 

 know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that 

 the production and extinction of the past and present in- 

 habitants of the world should have been due to secondary 

 causes, like those determining the birth and death of the 

 individual. When I view all beings not as special creations, 

 but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived 

 long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was de- 

 posited, they seem to me to become ennobled. Judging from 

 the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will 

 transmit its unaltered likeness to a distinct futurity. 

 And of the species now living very few will transmit 

 progeny of any kind to a far distant futurity; for the 

 manner in which all organic beings are grouped, shows 

 that the greater number of species in each genus, and all 

 the species in many genera, have left no descendants, 

 but have become utterly extinct. We can so far take a 

 prophetic glance into futurity as to foretell that it will be 

 the common and widely spread species, belonging to the 

 larger and dominant groups within each class, which will 

 ultimately prevail and procreate new and dominant species. 

 As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of 

 those which lived long before the Cambrian epoch, we may 

 feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has 

 never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has deso- 

 lated the whole world. Hence, we may look with some 

 confidence to a secure future of great length. And as 

 natural selection works solely by and for the good of each 

 being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to 

 progress toward 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 



