440 Life and Immortality. 
of an equally secure and inappreciably enduring earth-life. 
And as Natural Selection operates solely by and for the good 
of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will 
tend to progress toward perfection. 
When we contemplate a tangled bank, with innumerable 
plants of diverse kinds, and many-voiced birds singing in 
concert, or waging destruction on manifold insects that are 
flitting about, or the long, slimy worm that has come up 
from its underground retreat, we are lost in wonder and 
admiration, and can only reflect that these elaborately con- 
structed forms, so different from each other, and so strangely 
and intricately dependent on each other, have all been 
evolved by laws that act all around us. These are the laws 
of Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance, which is almost 
implied by reproduction; Variability from the action, direct 
and indirect, of the conditions of life, and from use and dis- 
use; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for 
Existence, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, or Sur- 
vival of the Fittest, entailing thereby Divergence of Charac- 
ter and the Extinction of less-improved forms. And thus, 
from the war of nature, and from famine and death, have 
arisen the higher mammalia, in which man, the susmna sum- 
marunt of life, is included. He occupies the summit, toward 
which the efforts of millions of buried ages seem to have 
been tending. There is a grandeur in this view of life, with 
its several powers, originally breathed, by the operation of 
the natural laws, into one or a few forms of life, and that, 
while the earth, in obedience to the fixed principle of gravi- 
tation, has gone cycling on, endless forms, most beautiful 
and most wonderful, have been, and are being, evolved from 
so simple a beginning. 
While thus it has been shown that life has been progress- 
ive, successive forms of life being the result of modification 
through descent, those faring the best in the Struggle for 
Existence surviving, by reason of some advantage, physical 
or otherwise, gained over their competitors, yet little, bearing 
