My reasons have now been assigned for believing that specific forms are not immutable creations[{518}]. The terms used by naturalists of affinity, unity of type, adaptive characters, the metamorphosis and abortion of organs, cease to be metaphorical expressions and become intelligible facts. We no longer look at an organic being as a savage does at a ship[{519}] or other great work of art, as at a thing wholly beyond his comprehension, but as a production that has a history which we may search into. How interesting do all instincts become when we speculate on their origin as hereditary habits, or as slight congenital modifications of former instincts perpetuated by the individuals so characterised having been preserved. When we look at every complex instinct and mechanism as the summing up of a long history of contrivances, each most useful to its possessor, nearly in the same way as when we look at a great mechanical invention as the summing up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen. How interesting does the geographical distribution of all organic beings, past and present, become as throwing light on the ancient geography of the world. Geology loses glory[{520}] from the imperfection of its archives, but it gains in the immensity of its subject. There is much grandeur in looking at every existing organic being either as the lineal successor of some form now buried under thousands of feet of solid rock, or as being the co-descendant of that buried form of some more ancient and utterly lost inhabitant of this world. It accords with what we know of the laws impressed by the Creator[{521}] on matter that the production and extinction of forms should, like the birth and death of individuals, be the result of secondary means. It is derogatory that the Creator of countless Universes should have made by individual acts of His will the myriads of creeping parasites and worms, which since the earliest dawn of life have swarmed over the land and in the depths of the ocean. We cease to be astonished[{522}] that a group of animals should have been formed to lay their eggs in the bowels and flesh of other sensitive beings; that some animals should live by and even delight in cruelty; that animals should be led away by false instincts; that annually there should be an incalculable waste of the pollen, eggs and immature beings; for we see in all this the inevitable consequences of one great law, of the multiplication of organic beings not created immutable. From death, famine, and the struggle for existence, we see that the most exalted end which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the creation of the higher animals[{523}], has directly proceeded. Doubtless, our first impression is to disbelieve that any secondary law could produce infinitely numerous organic beings, each characterised by the most exquisite workmanship and widely extended adaptations: it at first accords better with our faculties to suppose that each required the fiat of a Creator. There[{524}] is a [simple] grandeur in this view of life with its several powers of growth, reproduction and of sensation, having been originally breathed into matter under a few forms, perhaps into only one[{525}], and that whilst this planet has gone cycling onwards according to the fixed laws of gravity and whilst land and water have gone on replacing each other—that from so simple an origin, through the selection of infinitesimal varieties, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been evolved.

INDEX

For the names of Authors, Birds, Mammals (including names of classes) and Plants, see sub-indexes under Authors, Birds, Mammals and Plants.

Footnotes

[{1}] See the extracts in Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ii. p. 5.

[{2}] The second volume,—especially important in regard to Evolution,—reached him in the autumn of 1832, as Prof. Judd has pointed out in his most interesting paper in Darwin and Modern Science. Cambridge, 1909.

[{3}] Obituary Notice of C. Darwin, Proc. R. Soc. vol. 44. Reprinted in Huxley's Collected Essays. See also Life and Letters of C. Darwin, ii. p. 179.