pon an innate tendency to development--the push
of life, or creative evolution, as Bergson names it; not primarily
because the variations are advantages, but because the formation of a
new species is such a slow process, stretches over such a period of
geologic time, that the slight variations from generation to
generation could have no survival value. The primary factor is the
inherent tendency to development. The origin of species is on a scale
of time of enormous magnitude. What takes place among our domestic
animals of a summer day is by no means a safe guide as to what befell
their ancestors in the abysses of geologic time. It is true that
Nature may be read in the little as well as in the big,--_Natura in
minimis existat_,--in the gnat as well as in the elephant; but she
cannot be read in our yearly calendars as she can in the calendars of
the geologic strata. Species go out and species come in; the book of
natural revelation opens and closes at chance places, and rarely do we
get a continuous record--in no other case more clearly than in that of
the horse.

The horse was a horse, from the first five-toed animal in Eocene
times, millions of years ago, through all the intermediate forms of
four-toed and three-toed, down to the one-toed superb creature of our
own day. Amid all the hazards and delays of that vast stretch of time,
one may say, the horse-impulse never faltered. The survival value of
the slight gains in size and strength from millennium to millennium
could have played no part. It was the indwelling necessity toward
development that determined the issue. This assertion does not deliver
us into the hands of teleology, but is based upon the idea that
ontogeny and phylogeny are under the same law of growth. In the little
eohippus was potentially the horse we know, as surely as the oak is
potential in the acorn, or the bird potential in the egg, whatever
element of mystery may enter into the problem.

In fields where speed wins, the fleetest are the fittest. In fields
where strength wins, the strongest are the fittest. In fields where
sense-acuteness wins, the keenest of eye, ears, and nose are the
fittest.

When we come to the race of man, the fittest to survive, from our
moral and intellectual point of view, is not always the best. The
lower orders of humanity are usually better fitted to survive than the
higher orders--they are much more prolific and adaptive. The tares are
better fitted to survive th