nd continually hard put to it to escape
becoming a mouthful for some huge reptile. And yet the persecution,
the impossibility of contending by brute strength, may have forced
the mammal into the line of brain-building and placental
development. The early development of mammals appears to have been
slow. Palaeontology proves that they were long surpassed by reptiles
and birds. But the little mammal had the future. The battle was to
go against the strong.

Once again. The arboreal life of higher mammals would seem to be
most easily explained by the view that they were driven to it by
stronger carnivorous mammals having possession of the ground. Brain
was good, for it planned escape from enemies. But it did not give
its possessor immediate victory over muscle, tooth, and claw in the
tiger. That was to come far later with the invention of traps and
guns. Brain gave its possessor a sure hold of the future, and just
enough of the present to enable it to survive by a hard struggle.
And the same appears to have been true of primitive man.

Thus all man's ancestors have had to lead a life of continual
struggle against overwhelming odds and of seeming defeat. It was a
life of hardship, if not of positive suffering. The organ which was
to give them future supremacy, whether it was backbone, placenta, or
brain, could in its earlier stages aid them only to a hardly won
survival. The present apparently, and really as far as freedom from
discomfort and danger is concerned, always belongs to forms
hopelessly doomed to degeneration or stagnation. Crabs, not
primitive vertebrates, were masters of the good things of the sea;
and, in later times, reptiles, not mammals, of those of the land.
Any progressive form has to choose between the present and the
future. It cannot grasp both. I am not propounding to you any
metaphysical theories, but plain, dry, hard facts of palaeontology;
explain them as you will.

And here we must add our last word about conformity to environment;
and it is a most important consideration. Conformity to environment
is not such an adaptation as will confer upon an animal the greatest
immunity from discomfort or danger, or will enable it to gain the
greatest amount of food and place, and produce the largest number of
offspring. Indeed, if you will add one element to those mentioned
above, namely, that all these shall be attained with the least
amount of effort, they insure degeneration beyond a doubt. This is
th