laces. Undoubtedly such things are inherited. The snowshoes
of the partridge and rabbit are inherited. The needs of the organism
influence structure. The spines in the quills in the tails of
woodpeckers, and in the brown creeper, are other cases in point. The
nuthatch has no spines on its tail, because it can move in all
directions, as well with head down as with head up. I have read of a
serpent somewhere that feeds upon eggs. As the serpent has no lips or
distendable cheeks, and as its mechanism of deglutition acts very
slowly, an egg crushed in the mouth would be mostly spilled. So the
eggs are swallowed whole; but in the throat they come in contact with
sharp tooth-like spines, which are not teeth, but downward projections
from the backbone, and which serve to break the shells of the eggs.
Radical or vital variations are rare, and we do not witness them any
more than we witness the birth of a new species. And that is all there
is to Natural Selection. It is a name for a process of elimination
which is constantly going on in animate nature all about us. It is in
no sense creative, it originates nothing, but clinches and toughens
existing forms.

The mutation theory of De Vries is a much more convincing theory of
the origin of species than is Darwin's Natural Selection. If things
would only mutate a little oftener! But they seem very reluctant to do
so. There does seem to have been some mutation among plants,--De
Vries has discovered several such,--but in animal life where are the
mutants? When or where has a new species originated in this way?
Surely not during the historic period.

Fluctuations are in all directions around a center--the mean is always
returned to; but mutations, or the progressive steps in evolution, are
divergent lines away from the center. Fluctuations are superficial and
of little significance; but mutations, if they occur, involve
deep-seated, fundamental factors, factors more or less responsive to
the environment, but not called into being by it. Of the four factors
in the Darwinian formula,--variation, heredity, the struggle, and
natural selection,--variation is the most negligible; it furnishes an
insufficient handle for selection to take hold of. Something more
radical must lead the way to new species.

As applied to species, the fittest to survive is a misleading term.
All are fit to survive from the fact that they do survive. In a world
where, as a rule, the race is to the swift and the