438 THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 



widely spread species, belonging to the larger and dominant 

 groups within each class, which will ultimately prevail and pro- 

 create 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 desolated the whole world. Hence, we may look with some 

 confidence to a secure future of great length. And as natural se- 

 lection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corpo- 

 real and mental endowments will tend to progress toward per- 

 fection. 



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 con- 

 structed 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 reproduction; Variability 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 Char- 

 acter 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 follows. There is 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, 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. 



