24 EEPORT — 1889. 



the belief, difficult as it sometimes is in the face of the strange, incompre- 

 hensible, apparent defects in structure, and the far stranger, weird, ruth- 

 less savagery of habit, often brought to light by the study of the ways of 

 living creatures, that natural selection, or survival of the fittest, has, among 

 other agencies, played a most important part in the production of the 

 present condition of the organic world, and that it is a universally acting 

 and beneficent force continually tending towards the perfection of the 

 individual, of the race, and of all living nature. 



I can even go further and allow my dream still thus to run : 



Oh yet we trust that somehow good 

 Will be the final goal of ill, — 



That nothing walks with aimless feet. 



That not one life shall be destroyed 



Or cast as rubbish to the void 

 When God hath made the pile complete. 



