Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/213

Rh The plants and animals existing at any time in any locality tend constantly to diffuse themselves around that local centre, this tendency being controlled by the conditions of climate, etc., of the surrounding area, so that under certain unfavorable conditions diffusion ceases.

The possibilities of life are further seen to be everywhere directly influenced by all external conditions, such as those of climate, including temperature, humidity, and wind; of the length of the seasons and days and nights; of the character of the surface, whether it be land or water; and whether it be covered by vegetation or otherwise; of the nature of the soil; of the presence of other living creatures, and many more. The abundance of forms of life in different areas (as distinguished from number of individuals) is also found to vary greatly, and to be related to the accessibility of such areas to immigration from without; to the existence, within or near the areas, of localities offering considerable variations of the conditions that chiefly affect life; and to the local climate and conditions being compatible with such immigration.

For the explanation of these and other phenomena of organization and distribution, the only direct evidence that observation can supply is that derived from the mode of propagation of creatures now living; and no other mode is known than that which takes place by ordinary generation, through descent from parent to offspring.

It was left for the genius of Darwin to point out how the course of Nature, as it now acts in the reproduction of living creatures, is sufficient for the interpretation of what had previously been incomprehensible in these matters. He showed how propagation by descent operates subject to the occurrence of certain small variations in the offspring, and that the preservation of some of these varieties to the exclusion of others follows as a necessary consequence when the external conditions are more suitable to the preserved forms than to those lost. The operation of these causes he called Natural Selection. Prolonged over a great extent of time, it supplies the long-sought key to the complex system of forms either now living on the earth, or the remains of which are found in the fossil state, and explains the relations among them, and the manner in which their distribution has taken place in time and space.

Thus we are brought to the conclusion that the directing forces which have been efficient in developing the existing forms of life from those which went before them are those same successive external conditions including both the forms of land and sea., and the character of the climate, which have already been shown to arise from the gradual modification of the material fabric of the globe as it slowly attained to its present state. In each succeeding epoch, and in each separate locality, the forms preserved and handed on to the future were determined by the general conditions of surface at the time and place; and the aggregate of successive sets of conditions over the