98 HEREDITY AND EVOLUTION IN PLANTS 



is true. Darwinism neither eliminates God, nor does it 

 teach that monkeys were the ancestors of men. 



By slow degrees, however, men began to give more care- 

 ful and unprejudiced attention to the new theory, and not 

 to pass adverse judgment upon it until they were sure they 

 understood it. "A celebrated author and divine has 

 written to me," says Darwin, "that he has gradually 

 learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the 

 Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capa- 

 ble of self-development into other and needful forms, as 

 to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply 

 the voids caused by the action of His laws." 



And in closing his epoch-making book, Darwin called 

 attention to the fact that, in the light of evolution, all 

 phases of natural science possess more interest and more 

 grandeur. 



"When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage 

 looks at a ship, as something wholly beyond his compre- 

 hension; when we regard every production of nature as 

 one which has had a long history; when we contemplate 

 every complex structure and instinct as the summing up 

 of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, in the 

 same way as any great mechanical invention is the sum- 

 ming up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even 

 the blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view 

 each organic being, how far more interesting — I speak from 

 experience — does the study of natural history become!" 



"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 



