CHARLES DARWIN, 1859
We will now discuss the words of struggle.
Yet with every extinction we behold
the face we forget
the birds singing
insects and seeds destroying
we forget the eggs
destroyed each year.
I should premise including dependence of one important animal
truly to struggle with the edge of a thousand seeds
more truly struggle with the ground, these trees and disseminated birds
to devour and pass into each other.
A struggle to increase eggs or seeds
must suffer destruction
on the principle that no product can possibly survive
a struggle of species with the physical conditions of life
applied to the animal kingdoms.
The rule that destroyed the earth
covered the slow-breeding years
in less than two seeds and a million plants
descended from the first pair of parasites.
The immutable world was thought to lapse
without geological record so perfect
that the mutation of mutation
to admit clear and distinct changes of the steps
as that felt by so many geologists
had been formed and great valleys
still at work of even a million slight variations.
I am fully convinced of the truth
of an abstract multitude of facts
all viewed from a point of view directly opposite
to ignorance, expressions and unexplained difficulties
but I look with confidence to the future
to view the species by conviction
of prejudice be removed.
In the future I see open fields
securely based on Herbert Spencer
and capacity by gradation, much light and history.
Authors of the highest species to my mind
with the laws impressed on matter by the production
and extinction of the past and present
determining the birth and death of the individual
special creations, lineal descendants of some few beings
which lived in unaltered likeness
to a distant futurity.
All organic shows,
all the utterly extinct,
a glance into the common class
will ultimately procreate dominant forms of life
long before we may feel
the ordinary desolated world
progress towards perfection.
It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank
with plants, birds, various insects and worms crawling through the damp earth
and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
A.C. 2014
Læs også – meget apropos – sidste afsnit af Problemer.