are: many species
of animals perish as man fills and subjugates the globe, but those that
remain have far greater happiness in their lives. In fact, all the
purposes which Paley traces in the formation of living creatures are not
only fulfilled by what the Creator has done, but are better fulfilled
from age to age. And though the progress may be exceedingly slow, the
nature of the progress cannot be mistaken.

If the Natural Theology were now to be written, the stress of the
argument would be put on a different place. Instead of insisting wholly
or mainly on the wonderful adaptation of means to ends in the structure
of living animals and plants, we should look rather to the original
properties impressed on matter from the beginning, and on the beneficent
consequences that have flowed from those properties. We should dwell on
the peculiar properties that must be inherent in the molecules of the
original elements to cause such results to follow from their action and
reaction on one another. We should dwell on the part played in the
Universe by the properties of oxygen, the great purifier, and one of the
great heat-givers; of carbon, the chief light-giver and heat-giver; of
water, the great solvent and the storehouse of heat; of the atmosphere
and the vapours in it, the protector of the earth which it surrounds. We
should trace the beneficent effects of pain and pleasure in their
subservience to the purification of life. The marks of a purpose
impressed from the first on all creation would be even more visible than
ever before.

And we could not overlook the beauty of Nature and of all created things
as part of that purpose coming in many cases out of that very survival
of the fittest of which Darwin has spoken, and yet a distinct object in
itself. For this beauty there is no need in the economy of nature
whatever. The beauty of the starry heavens, which so impressed the mind
of Kant that he put it by the side of the Moral Law as proving the
existence of a Creator, is not wanted either for the evolution of the
world or for the preservation of living creatures. Our enjoyment of it
is a super-added gift certainly not necessary for the existence or the
continuance of our species. The beauty of flowers, according to the
teaching of the doctrine of Evolution, has generally grown out of the
need which makes it good for plants to attract insects. The insects
carry the pollen from flower to flower, and thus as it were mix the
br