﻿" It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of 

 many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, 

 and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these 

 elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon 

 each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around 

 us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Eeproduction ; 

 Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction ; Variability from the indirect 

 and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse : a Batio of 

 Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural 

 Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved 

 forms. Thus, from the war of Nature, from famine and death, the most exalted 

 object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher 

 animals, directly follows. There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several 

 powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into 

 one ; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of 

 gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful 

 have been, and are being evolved." — Darwin. 



