Page - 366 - in The Origin of Species

366 ORIGIN OF SPECIES others; or, if changing, should change in a less degree. We find similar relations between the existing inhabitants of dis- tinct countries ; for instance, the land-shells and coleopterous insects of Madeira have come to differ considerably from their nearest allies on the continent of Europe, whereas the marine shells and birds have remained unaltered. We can perhaps understand the apparently quicker rate of change in terrestrial and in more highly organised productions com- pared with marine and lower productions, by the more com- plex relations of the higher beings to their organic and in- organic conditions of life, as explained in a former chapter. When many of the inhabitants of any area have become modified and improved, we can understand, on the principle of competition, and from the all-important relations of or- ganism to organism in the struggle for life, that any form which did not become in some degree modified and improved, would be liable to extermination. Hence we see why all the species in the same region do at last, if we look to long enough intervals of time, become modified, for otherwise they would become extinct. In members of the same class the average amount of change during long and equal periods of time, may, perhaps, be nearly the same; but as the accumulation of enduring formation, rich in fossils, depends on great masses of sedi- ment being deposited on subsiding areas, our formations have been almost necessarily accumulated at wide and irregularly intermittent intervals of time; consequently the amount of organic change exhibited by the fossils embedded in consecu- tive formations is not equal. Each formation, on this view, does not mark a new and complete act of creation, but only an occasional scene, taken almost at hazard in an ever slowly changing drama. We can clearly understand why a species when once lost should never reappear, even if the very same conditions of life, organic and inorganic, should recur. For though the offspring of one species might be adapted (and no doubt this has occurred in innumerable instances) to fill the place of another species in the economy of nature, and thus sup- plant it; yet the two forms—the old and the new—would not be identically the same; for both would almost certainly