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Rh  in time. Destruction but makes room for more destruction; and not only is the onflowing river of life full to its banks, but ten thousand-fold more creatures are born than can be preserved. Each species reproduces at a rate that is out of all relation to the possible means of subsistence. If Mr. Bergh's sparrows could multiply at their normal rate, unchecked by the agencies of decimation, they would take possession of the world, and humanity and philanthropy would end together. And so it has ever been through the countless ages of the earth's history; so that its very rocks, for miles in depth, are filled with the fossil remains of innumerable tribes of creatures, which warred with each other through geological periods, and have now utterly perished. And it is to-day as it has been through the immeasurable past-millions of species scattered over the earth's surface, from pole to pole, are engaged in a struggle for existence, that is carried on everywhere with unrelenting severity.

From the point of view of sentiment alone, this is not a pleasant picture. Considered by itself, a hawk with a sparrow in its talons is not suggestive of beneficent intentions. If all this remorseless destruction has been beneficently designed, we must widen our notions of beneficent design. Science does this, by showing that out of the universal agony Nature is slowly, very slowly, working up to a better condition of things. In the sanguinary struggle the fittest survive, the ill-adapted and less perfect are slain, and there comes improvement. The value of this progress is to be estimated by its terrible cost. Through the destruction of tribes with what seems an almost infinite wantonness have finally come creatures with higher capacities of enjoyment, as well as correlative suffering, and an order of beings that have acquired great power over the conditions of pleasure and pain. In man, the last term of advancement in the animate series, ameliorations and modifications of his primal savage propensities have gone on, until there has grown up a set of feelings that are kindly, merciful, sympathetic, and benevolent; and they have at length become so strengthened and organized in our nature that they are characterized as "the humane sentiments," or the "spirit of humanity." These are the final product of man's moral evolution, and, although the reminiscences and survivals of savagery in the shape of military systems still linger, yet the kindly, merciful, and generous emotions are steadily gathering force in the hearts of men, and are becoming more and more the predominant law of the social state. Terrestrial life has had a tragic history, but, when under the stern discipline of a mortal competitive strife the primitive cannibals have been so utterly transformed that many of their descendants have come to find their highest pleasure in the gratification of the sympathetic feelings, and even to regard the brute creation with a tender solicitude, as evinced by the organization of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, who shall say that the grandeur of the end does not justify all the terrible means by which it has been attained?

 

work is now the great text-book of a great subject. Darwin wrote on "The Descent of Man," and Haeckel, with greater learning, writes later upon the same subject. The interest in these volumes will mainly depend, of course, upon the reader's interest in the questions it considers. Those who wish