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 Reproduction; Inheritance which is
almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and
direct action of the external 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 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 conceiving, 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 into a few forms or
into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to
the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most
beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
