But I do believe that natural selection will generally act very slowly, only at long intervals of time, and only on a few of the inhabitants of the same region.

I further believe that these slow, intermittent results accord well with what geology tells us of the rate and manner at which the inhabitants of the world have changed.

Slow though the process of selection may be, if feeble man can do much by artificial selection, I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and complexity of the coadaptations between all organic beings, one with another and with their physical conditions of life, which may have been effected in the long course of time through nature's power of selection, that is by the survival of the fittest.

This subject will be more fully discussed in our chapter on Geology; but it must here be alluded to from being intimately connected with natural selection.

Natural selection acts solely through the preservation of variations in some way advantageous, which consequently endure.