350 THE WORLD OF LIFE 



or of any organising, directive, or creative mind as the 

 fundamental cause of life and organisation, are altogether 

 ignored, or, if referred to, are usually discussed as altogether 

 unscientific and as showing a deplorable want of confidence 

 in the powers of the human mind to solve all terrestrial 

 problems. 



If, as I have attempted to do here, we take a broad 

 and comprehensive view of the vast world of life as it is 

 spread out before us, and also of that earlier world which goes 

 back, and ever farther back, into the dim past among the 

 relics of preceding forms of life, tracing all living things to 

 more generalised and usually smaller forms ; still going 

 back, till one after another of existing families, orders, and 

 even classes, of animals and plants either cease to appear or 

 are represented only by rudimentary forms, often of types 

 quite unknown to us ; we meet with ever greater and greater 

 difficulties in dispensing with a guiding purpose and an 

 immanent creative power. 



For we are necessarily led back at last to the beginnings 

 of life — to that almost infinitely remote epoch myriads of 

 years before the earliest forms of life we are acquainted with 

 had left their fragmentary remains in the rocks. Then, at 

 some definite epoch, the rudiments of life must have 

 appeared. But whenever it began, whenever the first 

 vegetable cell began its course of division and variation ; 

 and when, very soon after, the animal cell first appeared to 

 feed upon it and be developed at its expense, — from that 

 remote epoch, through all the ages till our own day, a 

 continuous, never-ceasing, ever-varying process has been 

 at work in the two great kingdoms, vegetal and animal, 

 side by side, and always in close and perfect adaptation to 

 each other. 



Myriads of strange forms have appeared, have given birth 

 to a variety of species, have reached a maximum of size, and 

 have then dwindled and died out, giving way to higher and 

 better-adapted creatures ; but never has there been a 

 complete break, never a total destruction, even of terrestrial 

 forms of life ; but ever and ever they became more numerous 

 more varied, more beautiful, and better adapted to the wants, 

 the material progress, the higher enjoyments of mankind. 



