group of animals should have been directly
created to lay their eggs in bowels and flesh of other,--that some
organisms should delight in cruelty,--that animals should be led away by
false instincts,--that annually there should be an incalculable waste
of eggs and pollen. From death, famine, rapine, and the concealed war of
nature we can see that the highest good, which we can conceive, the
creation of the higher animals has directly come. Doubtless it at first
transcends our humble powers, to conceive laws capable of creating
individual organisms, each characterised by the most exquisite
workmanship and widely-extended adaptations. It accords better with [our
modesty] the lowness of our faculties to suppose each must require the
fiat of a creator, but in the same proportion the existence of such laws
should exalt our notion of the power of the omniscient Creator{183}.
There is a simple grandeur in the view of life with its powers of
growth, assimilation and reproduction, being originally breathed into
matter under one or a few forms, and that whilst this our planet has
gone circling on according to fixed laws, and land and water, in a cycle
of change, have gone on replacing each other, that from so simple an
origin, through the process of gradual selection of infinitesimal
changes, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been
evolved{184}.

{179} The simile of the savage and the ship occurs in the _Origin_,
Ed. i. p. 485, vi. p. 665.

{180} In the _Origin_, Ed. i. p. 486, vi. p. 665, the author speaks
of the "summing up of many contrivances": I have therefore
introduced the above words which make the passage clearer. In the
_Origin_ the comparison is with "a great mechanical
invention,"--not with a work of art.

{181} See a similar passage in the _Origin_, Ed. i. p. 487, vi. p.
667.

{182} See the _Origin_, Ed. i. p. 488, vi. p. 668.

{183} The following discussion, together with some memoranda are on
the last page of the MS. "The supposed creative spirit does not
create either number or kind which <are> from analogy adapted to site
(viz. New Zealand): it does not keep them all permanently adapted
to any country,--it works on spots or areas of creation,--it is not
persistent for great periods,--it creates forms of same groups in
same regions, with no physical similarity,--it creates, on islands
or mountain summ