ferring to your book, I find such expressions as "Man selects only for
his own good; Nature only for that of the being which she tends." This,
it seems, will always be misunderstood; but if you had said, "Man
selects only for his own good; Nature, by the inevitable survival of the
fittest, only for that of the being she tends," it would have been less
liable to be so.

I find you use the term Natural Selection in two senses--(1) for the
simple preservation of favourable and rejection of unfavourable
variations, in which case it is equivalent to "survival of the fittest";
(2) for the _effect or change_ produced by this preservation, as when
you say, "To sum up the circumstances favourable or unfavourable to
natural selection," and, again, "Isolation, also, is an important
element in the process of natural selection": here it is not merely
"survival of the fittest," but _change_ produced by survival of the
fittest, that is meant. On looking over your fourth chapter, I find that
these alterations of terms can be in most cases easily made, while in
some cases the addition of "or survival of the fittest" after "natural
selection" would be best; and in others, less likely to be
misunderstood, the original term might stand alone.

I could not venture to propose to any other person so great an
alteration of terms, but you, I am sure, will give it an impartial
consideration, and, if you really think the change will produce a better
understanding of your work, will not hesitate to adopt it. It is
evidently also necessary not to personify "nature" too much, though I am
very apt to do it myself, since people will not understand that all such
phrases are metaphors. Natural Selection is, when understood, so
necessary and self-evident a principle that it is a pity it should be in
any way obscured; and it therefore occurs to me that the free use of
"survival of the fittest", which is a compact and accurate definition of
it, would tend much to its being more widely accepted and prevent its
being so much misrepresented and misunderstood.

There is another objection made by Janet which is also a very common
one. It is that the chances are almost infinite against the particular
kind of variation required being coincident with each change of external
conditions, to enable an animal to become modified by Natural Selection
in harmony with such changed conditions; especially when we consider
that, to have produced the almost infinite modific