Page - 375 - in The Origin of Species

FORMS OF LIFE CHANGING 375 phenomena, it will appear certain that all these modifications of species, their extinction, and the introduction of new ones, cannot be owing to mere changes in marine currents or other causes more or less local and temporary, but depend on gen- eral laws which govern the whole animal kingdom." M. Barrande has made forcible remarks to precisely the same effect. It is, indeed, quite futile to look to changes of cur- rents, climate, or other physical conditions, as the cause of these great mutations in the forms of life throughout the world, under the most different climates. We must, as Bar- rande has remarked, look to some special law. We shall see this more clearly when we treat of the present distribution of organic beings, and find how slight is the relation between the physical conditions of various countries and the nature of their inhabitants. This great fact of the parallel succession of the forms of life throughout the world, is explicable on the theory of natural selection. New species arc formed by having some advantage over older forms ; and the forms, which are al- ready dominant, or have some advantage over the other forms in their own country, give birth to the greatest num- ber of new varieties or incipient species. We have distinct evidence on this head, in the plants which are dominant, that is, which are commonest and most widely diffused, producing the greatest number of new varieties. It is also natural that the dominant, varying, and far-spreading species, which have already invaded to a certain extent the territories of other species, should be those which would have the best chance of spreading still further, and of giving rise in new countries to other new varieties and species The process of diffusion would often be very slow, depending on climatal and geo- graphical changes, on strange accidents, and on the gradual acclimatisation of new species to the various climates through which they might have to pass, but in the course of time the dominant forms would generally succeed in spreading and would ultimately prevail. The diffusion would, it is probable, be slower with the terrestrial inhabi- tants of the distinct continents than with the marine inhabi- tants of the continuous sea. We might therefore expect to find, as we do find, a less strict degree of parallelism in the