The American Journal of Science and Arts

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S. Converse, 1860

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Página 148 - As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Cambrian epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of great length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.
Página 147 - Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity. And of the species now living very few will transmit progeny of any kind to a far distant futurity...
Página 148 - I believe that animals have descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number.
Página 158 - The limbs divided into great branches, and these into lesser and lesser branches, were themselves once, when the tree was small, budding twigs; and this connexion of the former and present buds by ramifying branches may well represent the classification of all extinct and living species in groups subordinate to groups.
Página 172 - When we travel southward and see a species decreasing in numbers, we may feel sure that the cause lies quite as much in other species being favored as in this one being hurt.
Página 170 - We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see superabundance of food; we do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life ; or we forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey...
Página 170 - Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult — at least I have found it so — than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind.
Página 159 - ... extinct and living species in groups subordinate to groups. Of the many twigs which flourished when the tree was a mere bush, only two or three, now grown into great branches, yet survive and bear the other branches ; so with the species which lived during long-past geological periods, very few have left living and modified descendants.
Página 449 - THE BOYDEN PREMIUM URIAH A. BOYDEN, ESQ., of Boston, Mass., has deposited with THE FRANKLIN INSTITUTE the sum of one thousand dollars, to be awarded as a premium to "Any resident of North America who shall determine by experiment whether all rays of light,* and other physical rays, are or are not transmitted with the same velocity.
Página 158 - At each period of growth all the growing twigs have tried to branch out on all sides, and to overtop and kill the surrounding twigs and branches, in the same manner as species and groups of species have at all times overmastered other species in the great battle for life.

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