| → which 1859 1860 |
| within each class, which 1861 1866 1869 1872 |
|
|
first bed of the
system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled. Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity. And of the species now living very few will transmit progeny of any kind to a far distant futurity; for the manner in which all organic beings are grouped, shows that the greater number of species
each genus, and all the species
many genera, have left no descendants, but have become utterly extinct. We can so far take a prophetic glance into futurity as to
that it will be the common and widely-spread species, belonging to the larger and dominant
→which
will ultimately prevail and procreate new and dominant species. As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the
epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of
length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all
and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection. |
|
| It is interesting to contemplate
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
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;
which is almost implied by reproduction;
from the indirect and direct action of the
|
