battle to the
strong, the slow and the frail also survive because they do not come
in competition with the swift and the strong. Nature mothers all, and
assigns to each its sphere.

The Darwinians are hostile to Lamarck with his inner developing and
perfecting principle, and, by the same token, to Aristotle, who is
the father of the theory. They regard organic evolution as a purely
mechanical process.

Variation can work only upon a variable tendency--an inherent impulse
to development. A rock, a hill, a stream, may change, but it is not
variable in the biological sense: it can never become anything but a
rock, a hill, a stream; but a flower, an egg, a seed, a plant, a baby,
can. What I mean to say is that there must be the primordial tendency
to development which Natural Selection is powerless to beget, and
which it can only speed up or augment. It cannot give the wing to the
seed, or the spring, or the hook; or the feather to the bird; or the
scale to the fish; but it can perfect all these things. The fittest of
its kind does stand the best chance to survive.

VI

After we have Darwin shorn of his selection theories, what has he
left? His significance is not lessened. He is still the most
impressive figure in modern biological science. His attitude of mind,
the problems he tackled, his methods of work, the nature and scope of
his inquiries, together with his candor, and his simplicity and
devotion to truth, are a precious heritage to all mankind.

Darwin's work is monumental because he belongs to the class of
monumental men. The doctrine of evolution as applied to animate
nature reached its complete evolution in his mind. He stated the
theory in broader and fuller terms than had any man before him; he
made it cover the whole stupendous course of evolution. He showed man
once for all an integral part of the zooelogic system. He elevated
natural history, or biology, to the ranks of the great sciences, a
worthy member of the triumvirate--astronomy, geology, biology. He
taught us how to cross-question the very gods of life in their council
chambers; he showed us what significance attaches to the simplest
facts of natural history.

Darwin impresses by his personality not less than by his logic and his
vast storehouse of observations. He was a great man before he was a
great natural-history philosopher. His patient and painstaking
observation is a lesson to all nature students. The minutest facts
engaged him. He s