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 in
each genus, and all the species in many genera, have left no descendants,
but have become utterly extinct. We can so far take a prophetic glance
into futurity as to foretell that it will be the common and widely spread
species, belonging to the larger and dominant groups within each class,
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 Cambrian 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 great length. And as natural selection works solely by
and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will
tend to progress towards perfection.
It is interesting to contemplate a tangled 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 upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been
produced by laws acting around us.
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