INTRODUCTION. 



XXVll 





debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living 

 creature, with his godlike intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of 

 the solar system — with all these exalted powers, man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible 

 stamp of his lowly origin." I do not accept, however, as many do, the purely materialistic theory, 

 because I am a believer in the truths of revelation and in the spiritual destiny of man. As that 

 of a humble worker in the field of science, earnestly seeking the truth, this is, so to speak, and as 

 I have avowed before, my confession of faith as a naturalist. To adopt Mr. Wallace's admirable 

 language on this point, I am " thus relieved from the crushing mental burden imposed upon those 

 who— maintaining that we, in common with the rest of nature, are but products of the blind 

 eternal forces of the universe, and believing also that the time must come when the sun will lose 

 his heat, and all life on the earth necessarily cease — have to contemplate a not very distant 

 future in which all this glorious earth— which for untold millions of years has been slowly 

 developing forms of life and beauty, to culminate at last in man — shall be as if it had never 

 existed ; who are compelled to suppose that all the slow growths of our race struggling towards a 

 higher life, all the agony of martyrs, all the groans of victims, all the evil and misery and 

 undeserved suffering of the ages, all the struggles for freedom, all the efforts towards justice, all 

 the aspirations for virtue and the well-being of humanity, shall absolutely vanish, and, ' like the 

 baseless fabric of a vision, leave not a wrack behind.' As contrasted with this hopeless and 

 soul-deadening belief, we, who accept the existence of a spiritual world, can look upon the 

 universe as a grand consistent whole, adapted in all its parts to the development of spiritual 

 beings, capable of indefinite life and perfectibility. . . . We thus feel that the Darwinian 

 theory, even when carried out to its extreme logical conclusion, not only does not oppose but 

 lends a decided support to a belief in the spiritual nature of man. It shows how man's body may 

 have been developed from that of a lower animal form under the law of natural selection ; but it 

 also teaches us that we possess intellectual and moral faculties which could not have been so 

 developed, but must have had another origin ; and for this origin we can only find an adequate 

 cause in the unseen universe of Spirit." 



OUE VANISHING FOEMS OF BIBD LIFE. 



To a naturalist there is, perhaps, nothing more melancholy than the wiping out or total ob- 

 literation of any living species from this fair world of ours. That this process has been going on 

 from time immemorial — races of animals and plants, under some inscrutable law of nature, vanish- 

 ing from our planet altogether, their places being occupied by others apparently better suited to 

 the changed environment — is known to every student of natural science. The fossiliferous rocks 

 reveal to us the unmistakable truth that these changes in the living population of the earth 

 during its past history " have been effected, not by the sudden replacement of one set of living- 

 beings by another, but by a process of slow and gradual introduction of new species, accompanied 

 by the extinction of the older forms." But we also know that, as we are accustomed to measure 

 time, forms of animal life are long persistent ; and, accordingly, it is when a species becomes 

 extinct within the memory of man — suffers, as it were, a violent death and passes away into 

 oblivion under our very eyes — that the force of this truth comes home to us. We then seem to 

 realise that a form of life which it has taken perhaps ages to develop has passed out of existence, 

 and that a gap has been made in the wonderful network of organic being which the ages to come, 

 under the changed circumstances of existence, will be unable to repair. The conditions of life all 

 over the world are so rapidly changing, with the spread of mankind and the growth of modern 

 civilisation, that the displacement or extirpation of native species goes forward at a rapidly 

 progressive rate. The result, in that respect, of the occupation or colonisation of new countries, 

 during the last fifty years, bears witness to the truth of this. One or two instances will suffice. 

 Fifty years ago the quagga, a species of zebra, was the commonest wild animal in South Africa, 



