most persons' estimation."[CB] We have enough before us to enable us to appreciate our author's feeling when he says, "Hardly any fact has struck me so much as the endless diversities of structure,--the prodigality of resources for gaining the very same end."[CC] Again when giving us his prevailing impression he says,--"The more I study nature, the more I become impressed with ever-increasing force, that the contrivances and beautiful adaptations, slowly acquired through each part occasionally varying in a slight degree, but in many ways, with the preservation of those variations which were beneficial to the organism under complex and ever varying conditions of life, transcend in an incomparable manner the contrivances and adaptations which the most fertile imagination of man could invent."[CD] In preparing the present summary of recent advances in this department of natural history, I have resorted freely to quotation, because of the obvious rule, that it is better for scientific interest, for proper understanding, and for regulation of all subsequent reasoning on the facts, that we have the observations presented as nearly as possible by those who made them, and that we have more general inferences in the very words of those whose minds have been filled and swayed by impressions made in the field of observation itself. In now proceeding to consider the bearing of these advances on religious thought, I shall keep as far as possible by the same rule, desiring that science may interpret itself, and translate its own special conclusions into their fit place within a scheme of the universe. And whatever there may be here of material for detailed inference, it will be taken by religious men as abundantly clear, that science in slowly unfolding to general view these secrets of nature, renders a lasting and most valuable service to religion. Our religious convictions and emotions rest on a wider intellectual basis according to the fulness with which we understand the marvels of adaptation and contrivance which lie covered from ordinary observation under the attractive surface of nature.