54 WHAT IS DARWINISM? 



is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, 

 clothed with many plants of many kinds, with 

 birds singing on the bushes, with various in- 

 sects flitting about, and with worms crawling 

 through the damp earth, and to reflect that 

 these elaborately constructed forms, so differ- 

 ent from each other, and dependent on 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 reproduction; variability from the indi- 

 rect and direct action of the conditions of life, 

 and from use and disuse ; a ratio of increase 

 so high as to lead to a struggle for life, and as 

 a consequence to natural selection, entailing 

 divergence of character and extinction of less 

 improved forms. Thus from the war of nature, 

 from famine and death, the most exalted ob- 

 ject which we are capable of conceiving, the 

 production of the higher animals directly fol- 

 lows. 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 grav- 

 ity, from so simple a beginning endless forms 

 most beautiful and most wonderful have been, 

 and are being evolved." (p. 579) 



