ABSTRACT
It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects itting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependant upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting upon us. These laws taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance … Variability … Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life … Natural Selection … Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved-forms.
