eneral departments of natural history would
rise greatly in interest. The terms used by naturalists--such terms as
affinity, relationship, community of type, paternity, morphology,
adaptive characters, rudimentary and abortive organs, etc.--would cease
to be metaphorical, and would have a plain signification. "When," he
wrote, "we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a
ship, as something wholly beyond his comprehension; when we regard every
production of nature as one which has had a long history; when we
contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of
many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, in the same way as any
great mechanical invention is the summing up of the labor, the
experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when
we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting--I speak from
experience--does the study of natural history become." Once more: "When
we can feel assured that all the individuals of the same species, and
all the closely allied species of most genera, have within a not very
remote period descended from one parent, and have migrated from some one
birthplace; and when we better know the many means of migration, then,
by the light which geology now throws, and will continue to throw, on
former changes of climate and of the level of the land, we shall surely
be enabled to trace in an admirable manner the former migrations of the
inhabitants of the whole world."

When Darwin published the "Origin of Species," he was aware that
theologians and philosophers seemed to be fully satisfied with the view
that each species had been independently created, and was immutable. To
his own mind, however, it accorded better with what was known of the
laws impressed on matter by the Creator that the production and
extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have
been due to secondary causes like those determining the birth and death
of the individual. "When I view," he said, "all beings not as special
creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived
long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they
seem to me to become ennobled." And again: "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