22 THE CREED OF SCIENCE, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL. 



to-day contemplates, there is still a vast distance. And 

 the question now rises, How have all these various 

 species in the organic world arisen ? How has the ele- 

 mentary life run into such endlessly varied forms, each 

 distinguished by its special kind and degree of adapta- 

 tions and beauty? Above all, how has life, starting 

 from such low beginnings, soared to such lofty heights 

 in man himself, severed, seemingly, on all sides from the 

 other species by a great gulf apparently not to be bridged, 

 as shown in his outward form, and yet more in his 

 inward nature and in its still growing capacities of 

 invention, of art, of thought, of disinterested virtuous 

 endeavour ? 



For answer to this most important question we must 

 consult the books of Darwin and of those who have 

 worked in the lines indicated in his world-famed theory. 

 As we there learn, the higher species of plants and 

 animals, including man, were derived from the lower, and 

 all ultimately from " one or a few primordial forms," 

 through the agency of Natural Selection combined with the 

 fact of Inheritance; the first representing the changing 

 and progressive, the second, the conservative factor in 

 the great process of organic evolution. Nature, or to 

 speak more precisely, a complicated but yet connected 

 and continuous process called Natural Selection, whose 

 action has extended over unimaginable ages, and is still 

 at work, was the unconscious sculptor and mechanician 

 that slowly extremely slowly elaborated all the various 

 forms of life that we now behold as well as many long 

 since extinct species. Natural selection it was that 

 separated the different species from each other ; that 

 carved their organs gradually, and ever more carefully, 

 from rough rudimentary attempts, and that fitted them 

 each to the other and all to their environment an un- 



