2 EVOLUTION AND ETHICS I 



the frosts of. winter, and the furious gales which 

 swept, with imbroken force, now from the Atlantic, 

 and now from the North Sea, at all times of the 

 year ; they filled up, as they best might, the gaps 

 made in their ranks by all sorts of underground 

 and overground animal ravagers. One year' with 

 another, an average population, the floating balance 

 of the unceasing struggle for existence among the 

 indigenous plants, maintained itself. It is as 

 little to be doubted, that an essentially similar 

 state of nature prevailed, in this region, for many 

 thousand years before the coming of Cassar ; and 

 there is no assignable reason for denying that it 

 might continue to exist through an equally pro- 

 longed futurity, except for the intervention of man. 



Reckoned by our customary standards of 

 duration, the_ native vegetation, like the " ever- 

 lasting hills " which it clothes, seems a type of 

 permanence. The little Amarella'Gentians, which 

 abound in some places to-day, are the descendants 

 of those that were trodden underfoot by the pre- 

 historic savages who have left their flint tools about, 

 here and there; and they followed ancestors 

 which, in the climate of the glacial epoch, probably 

 flourished better than they do now. Compared 

 with the long past of this humble plant, all the 

 history of civilized men is but an episode. 



Yet nothing is more certain than that, measured 

 by the liberal scale of time-keeping of the universe, 

 this present state of nature, however it may seem 



