490 
CONCLUSION. 
Chap. XIV. 
solely by and for the good of each beings all corporeal 
and mental endowments will tend to progress towards 
perfection. 
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled 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 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 Eeproduction; Inheritrnce 
which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability 
from the indirect and direct action of the external con¬ 
ditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Eatio of In¬ 
crease 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 con¬ 
ceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, 
directly follows. There is 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 
flxed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless 
forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, 
and are being, evolved. 
