press declarations. When
an idea pervades a book and constitutes its character, detached passages
constitute a very small part of the evidence of its being inculcated. In
the present case, however, such passages are sufficient to satisfy even
those who have not had occasion to read Mr. Darwin's books. In referring
to the similarity of structure in animals of the same class, he says,
"Nothing can be more hopeless than to attempt to explain this similarity
of pattern in members of the same class, by utility or the doctrine of
final causes."[12]

On the last page of his work, he says: "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 on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced
by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being
growth with reproduction; variability from the indirect and direct
action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a ratio of
increase so high as to lead to a struggle for life, and as a consequence
to natural selection, entailing divergence of character and extinction
of less improved forms. Thus from the war of nature, from famine and
death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, the
production of the higher animals directly follows. There is a grandeur
in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally
breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that whilst
this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity,
from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most
wonderful have been, and are being evolved." (p. 579)

In another of his works, he asks, "Did He (God) ordain that crop and
tail-feathers of the pigeon should vary, in order that the fancier might
make his grotesque pouter and fan-tail breeds? Did He cause the frame
and mental qualities of the dog to vary, in order that a breed might be
formed of indomitable ferocity, with jaws fitted to pin down the bull,
for man's brutal sport? But if we give up the principle in one case; if
we do not admit that the variations of the primeval dog were
intentionally guided in order, for instance, that the greyhound, that
perfect image of symmetry and vigor, might be for