318 WHAT OF THE FUTURE? 



reliable record renders any arguments founded on this 

 ground utterly idle and worthless. If vast physical changes 

 have passed unmarked by our ancestors, what marvel need 

 there be that the minuter phenomena of vital variations 

 should have wholly escaped their attention 1 If the varia- 

 tions, descent, and dispersion of the human family be a 

 matter of doubt and uncertainty to historians and ethnolo- 

 gists, what marvel need there be that the varieties, descent, 

 and dispersion of the lower races should have passed un- 

 noticed and even unsuspected 1 But if the introduction of 

 new genera and species cannot be positively proven, we 

 know that numerous forms have disappeared from certain 

 localities, and that several (the dinornis, sepiornis, dodo, 

 solitaire, great auk, rhytina, &c.), within a comparatively 

 recent period, have become altogether extinct. As extinc- 

 tion and creation ever went side by side in the past, so the 

 fair presumption is that extinction is attended by a similar 

 creation in the present. The minutest scrutiny can detect 

 no decay in the physical accompaniments of life, no decline 

 in the powers of vitality itself, and no change whatever 

 in any of its discoverable relations to external nature ; 

 and surely on these, as on all the grounds formerly men- 

 tioned, we are entitled to believe in a continuance of vital 

 development, as firmly as in a continuance of the physical 

 changes which are daily and hourly taking place around 

 us. The one may be less perceptible than the other, but 

 not on that account the less real ; slower in their rate of 

 progress, but not the less certain and continuous. 



Such a progression being granted, the Life of the future 

 must differ from that of the present, as that of the pre- 

 sent differs from all that went before. Old genera and 

 species must pass away, and newer and higher ones take 

 their places. As the ratio of development among the dif- 

 ferent classes and orders, both of plants and animals, seems 



