The limbs of the lower animals have never been modified by any act of
deliberation and forethought on their own part. Recent researches
have thrown absolutely no light upon the origin of life - upon the
initial force which introduced a sense of identity and a deliberate
faculty into the world; but they do certainly appear to show very
clearly that each species of the animal and vegetable kingdom has
been moulded into its present shape by chances and changes of many
millions of years, by chances and changes over which the creature
modified had no control whatever, and concerning whose aim it was
alike unconscious and indifferent, by forces which seem insensate to
the pain which they inflict, but by whose inexorably beneficent
cruelty the brave and strong keep coming to the fore, while the weak
and bad drop behind and perish. There was a moral government of this
world before man came near it - a moral government suited to the
capacities of the governed, and which unperceived by them has laid
fast the foundations of courage, endurance, and cunning. It laid
them so fast that they became more and more hereditary. Horace says
well fortes creantur fortibus et bonis, good men beget good children;
the rule held even in the geological period; good ichthyosauri begot
good ichthyosauri, and would to our discomfort have gone on doing so
to the present time had not better creatures been begetting better
things than ichthyosauri, or famine or fire or convulsion put an end
to them.
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