and will always direct effort
and use into lines which will be beneficial to its possessor. Here we
have the source of the fittest, _i.e._ addition of parts by increase and
location of growth-force, directed by the influence of various kinds of
compulsion in the lower, and intelligent option among higher animals.
Thus intelligent choice, taking advantage of the successive evolution of
physical conditions, may be regarded as the _originator of the fittest_,
while natural selection is the tribunal to which all results of
accelerated growth are submitted. This preserves or destroys them, and
determines the new points of departure on which accelerated growth shall
build."[206]

This notion of "intelligence"--the intelligence of the animal
itself--determining its own variation, is so evidently a very partial
theory, inapplicable to the whole vegetable kingdom, and almost so to
all the lower forms of animals, amongst which, nevertheless, there is
the very same adaptation and co-ordination of parts and functions as
among the highest, that it is strange to see it put forward with such
confidence as necessary for the completion of Darwin's theory. If "the
various kinds of compulsion"--by which are apparently meant the laws of
variation, growth, and reproduction, the struggle for existence, and the
actions necessary to preserve life under the conditions of the animal's
environment--are sufficient to have developed the varied forms of the
lower animals and of plants, we can see no reason why the same
"compulsion" should not have carried on the development of the higher
animals also. The action of this "intelligent option" is altogether
unproved; while the acknowledgment that natural selection is the
tribunal which either preserves or destroys the variations submitted to
it, seems quite inconsistent with the statement that intelligent choice
is the "orginator of the fittest," since whatever is really "the
fittest" can never be destroyed by natural selection, which is but
another name for the survival of the fittest. If "the fittest" is always
definitely produced by some other power, then natural selection is not
wanted. If, on the other hand, both fit and unfit are produced, and
natural selection decides between them, that is pure Darwinism, and Mr.
Cope's theories have added nothing to it.

[Illustration: FIG. 35.--Transformation of Artemia salina to A.
Milhausenii; 1, tail-lobe of A. salina, and its transition through
2,3,4,5,