THE EVOLUTION OF SPECIES 155 



been proceeding, environment has played a beneficent part. 

 It has killed off feeblenesses, and preserved the strong, the 

 well formed, and the worthy. It has nursed improve- 

 ments and carried them forward. In its times of greatest 

 severity and stress of physical conditions it has not, as 

 it might have done, slain all the children dependent upon 

 it. In its times of greatest scarcity of food it has left 

 sufficiency for a chosen remnant. When enemies most 

 prevailed, they never became so numerous and powerful 

 as to slay a large portion of the species. It has acted 

 throughout as with wisdom and discretion. Its very 

 severities braced, strengthened, and improved the children 

 of its choice. Why has environment acted in a manner 

 so ordered? Why has it tended to preserve useful 

 variations ? How has it been able to produce an animal 

 world so characterised by usefulness, suitableness, and 

 beauty ? Why has it co-operated with the life element so 

 perfectly ? Why, but because it has itself been ordered 

 and guided. It has been as a mighty mould, moulding 

 and fashioning all living things. It has been as if care- 

 fully devised from beginning to end for the purpose. 



The subject of environment thus leads us back to 

 evolution in another field the evolution of the universe 

 of worlds. All form a unity. All hang together. All 

 form part of the environment, and have their part in its 

 action. And if they have been evolved out of material 

 elements scattered through immensity, this work like 

 that of the evolution of life has been accomplished in a 

 manner transcendently glorious. In size and form, in 

 collocation and condition, we behold in them order on 

 the grandest scale. And on this condition of order being 

 brought about depended the evolution of life, on any 

 individual world depended the vast environment far and 

 near all around the earth, round its living forms, of which 



