ON THE CREATION AND GOD. 23 



conscious artist, that worked by seemingly disconnected 

 efforts and without any plan or preconception of the 

 result to be finally achieved, but who nevertheless, by 

 the simplest means, reached at length the most surprising 

 and splendid results. For, by acting on the simple rule 

 of selecting those individuals the best fitted to their sur- 

 rounding conditions to continue their kind, and soon or 

 late letting drop the ill-fitted, and by an undeviating 

 repetition of the process and adherence to the rule, Nature 

 has attained to all the wonderful and varied life that we 

 behold. Moreover, by acting in this manner, she evolved 

 ever higher as well as ever different types. By this 

 means she slowly evolved the wing of the bird, the fin 

 of the fish, the foot of the mammal, all so different 

 propellers from common germinal beginnings ; by this 

 means, by natural selection only, from an optic nerve, 

 coated with pigment and tingling in the sunlight, she 

 elaborated and perfected the living miracle of the human 

 eye, and adapted its lens to the properties of light; 

 finally, by this means she evolved the civilized man from 

 the savage, the savage from the brute, and the brute, 

 through ever lower lines, from the mollusc and the 

 moneron ; results so marvellous without the Darwinian 

 clue, that men were compelled to refer them to the 

 action of a Supernatural and Omnipotent Creator, who, 

 however, according to our anthropomorphic habits of 

 thought, still worked after our human 'fashion in fulfil- 

 ment of a plan and purpose. 



Thus Natural Selection, by seizing on favourable 

 variations accidentally offered, by accumulating and in- 

 tensifying these, and by thereafter handing them on as 

 a constantly increasing capital, from generation to genera- 

 tion, in the fact of Inheritance, succeeded in producing 

 all the variety of plant and animal life that now exists. 



