Pasturing at once, and in broad herds upsprung.
The grassy clods now calved; now half appears
The tawny lion, pawing to get free
His hinder parts--then springs, as broke from bonds,
And rampant shakes his brinded mane; the ounce,
The libbard, and the tiger, as the mole
Rising, the crumbled earth above them threw
In hillocks; the swift stag from underground
Bore up his branching head; scarce from his mould
Behemoth, biggest born of earth, upheaved
His vastness; fleeced the flocks and bleating rose
As plants; ambiguous between sea and land,
The river-horse and scaly crocodile.
At once came forth whatever creeps the ground,
Insect or worm."

There is no doubt as to the meaning of this statement, nor as to
what a man of Milton's genius expected would have been actually
visible to an eye-witness of this mode of origination of
living things.

The third hypothesis, or the hypothesis of evolution, supposes
that, at any comparatively late period of past time, our
imaginary spectator would meet with a state of things very
similar to that which now obtains; but that the likeness of the
past to the present would gradually become less and less, in
proportion to the remoteness of his period of observation from
the present day; that the existing distribution of mountains and
plains, of rivers and seas, would show itself to be the product
of a slow process of natural change operating upon more and more