ed; and very often that which, humanly speaking,
is inferiority, causes the survival. Superiority, whether in size,
strength, activity, or sagacity, is, other things equal, at the cost of
diminished fertility; and where the life led by a species does not
demand these higher attributes, the species profits by decrease of them,
and accompanying increase of fertility. This is the reason why there
occur so many cases of retrograde metamorphosis--this is the reason why
parasites, internal and external, are so commonly degraded forms of
higher types. Survival of the "better" does not cover these cases,
though survival of the "fittest" does; and as I am responsible for the
phrase, I suppose I am competent to say that the word "fittest" was
chosen for this reason. When it is remembered that these cases outnumber
all others--that there are more species of parasites than there are
species of all other animals put together--it will be seen that the
expression "survivorship of the better" is wholly inappropriate, and the
argument Mr. Martineau bases upon it quite untenable. Indeed, if, in
place of those adjustments of the human sense-organs, which he so
eloquently describes as implying pre-arrangement, Mr. Martineau had
described the countless elaborate appliances which enable parasites to
torture animals immeasurably superior to them, and which, from his point
of view, no less imply pre-arrangement, I think the notes of admiration
which end his descriptions would not have seemed to him so appropriate.

One more word there is from the intrinsic meaning of which Mr. Martineau
deduces what appears a powerful argument--the word _Evolution_ itself.
He says:--

"It means, to unfold from within; and it is taken from the history
of the seed or embryo of living natures. And what is the seed but a
casket of pre-arranged futurities, with its whole contents
_prospective_, settled to be what they are by reference to ends
still in the distance?"

Now, this criticism would have been very much to the point did the word
Evolution truly express the process it names. If this process, as
scientifically defined, really involved that conception which the word
evolution was originally designed to convey, the implications would be
those Mr. Martineau alleges. But, unfortunately for him, the word,
having been in possession of the field before the process was
understood, has been adopted merely because displacing it by another
w