Universes should have made by individual acts of His will the myriads of creeping parasites and worms, which since the earliest dawn of life have swarmed over the land and in the depths of the ocean. We cease to be astonished{522} that a group of animals should have been formed to lay their eggs in the bowels and flesh of other sensitive beings; that some animals should live by and even delight in cruelty; that animals should be led away by false instincts; that annually there should be an incalculable waste of the pollen, eggs and immature beings; for we see in all this the inevitable consequences of one great law, of the multiplication of organic beings not created immutable. From death, famine, and the struggle for existence, we see that the most exalted end which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the creation of the higher animals{523}, has directly proceeded. Doubtless, our first impression is to disbelieve that any secondary law could produce infinitely numerous organic beings, each characterised by the most exquisite workmanship and widely extended adaptations: it at first accords better with our faculties to suppose that each required the fiat of a Creator. There{524} is a [simple] grandeur in this view of life with its several powers of growth, reproduction and of sensation, having been originally breathed into matter under a few forms, perhaps into only one{525}, and that whilst this planet has gone cycling onwards according to the fixed laws of gravity and whilst land and water have gone on replacing each other--that from so simple an origin, through the selection of infinitesimal varieties, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been evolved. {518} This sentence corresponds, not to the final section of the _Origin_, Ed. i. p. 484, vi. p. 664, but rather to the opening words of the section already referred to (_Origin_, Ed. i. p. 480, vi. p. 657). {519} This simile occurs in the Essay of 1842, p. 50, and in the _Origin_, Ed. i. p. 485, vi. p. 665, _i.e._ in the final section of Ch. XIV (vi. Ch. XV). In the MS. there is some erasure in pencil of which I have taken no notice. {520} An almost identical sentence occurs in the _Origin_, Ed. i. p. 487, vi. p. 667. The fine prophecy (in the _Origin_, Ed. i. p. 486, vi. p. 666) on "the almost untrodden field of inquiry" is wanting in the present Essay. {521} See the last paragraph on p. 488 of the _Origin_, Ed. i., vi. p. 668. {522} A passage corresponding to this occurs in the sketch of 1842, p. 51, but not in the last chapter of the _Origin_.