130 LIFE OX THE EARTH. 



aggregates of individual lives, presented by single 

 species, generally in proportion to their minuteness. 

 All reckoning fails to reach their numbers, or those of 

 the countless multitudes of organised existences which 

 perish as ova or before they come to maturity. Every 

 book on natural history abounds in these facts; yet few 

 rightly comprehend them or feel adequately all that is 

 wonderful in this enormous multiplicity of life, and in 

 its renewal by reproduction, generation after genera- 

 tion, through successive ages of the globe. The most 

 minute insect or mollusc has its pedigree enrolled in 

 the great volume of life. If man could truly read 

 these histories some of the great problems of nature 

 might find their solution. 



I may say for myself that I never enter the Natural 

 History Galleries of the British Museum or the Zoo- 

 logical Gardens without a feeling of amazement mixed 

 with awe. And this feeling is not lost, but intensified, 

 by contemplation of details. Whence and for what 

 purpose in creation this marvellous number and variety 

 of beings of forms and organs, of instincts and ac- 

 tions ? The question cannot be evaded by reason, and 

 is not answered, even presumptively, by science. It 

 extends too beyond existing life (and with incalculable 

 time added as a part of the problem) to those fossil 

 vestiges of extinct life which now crowd upon us so 

 numerously from every part of the earth. A single 

 footstep pressed on one of the walks of the London 

 Parks covers thousands of minute shells, each the 

 habitat once of a living animal. Every railway tunnel 

 under a chalk-hill carries us through massive rock, the 



