Bailey.] ^'^ [May 1, 



itself express a literal principle or truth. If we accept the term in the 

 sense in which it was propounded by its author, we are equally bound to 

 accept " survival of the fittest " as a synonymous expression because its 

 author so designed it. "By natural selection or survival of the fittest," 

 writes Spencer, "by the preservation in successive generations of those 

 whose moving equilibria happen to be least at variance with the require- 

 ments, there is eventually produced a changed equilibrium completely in 

 harmony with the requirements." 



It should be said that there is no reason other than usage why the phrase 

 " survival of the fittest " should not apply to the result of Lamarckian or 

 functional evolution as well as of Darwinian or selective evolution. It 

 simply expresses a fact without designating the cause or the process. 

 Cope has written a book upon the " Origin of the Fittest," in which the 

 argument is Lamarckian. The phrase implies a conflict, and the loss of 

 certain contestants and the salvation of certain others. It asserts that the 

 contestants or characters which survive are the fittest, but it does not 

 explain whether they are fit because endowed with greater strength, 

 greater prolificness, completer harmony with surroundings, or other 

 attributes. I should like to suggest, therefore, that the chiefest merit of 

 the survivors is unlikeuess, and to call your attention for a few minutes 

 to the significance of the phrase — which I have used in my teaching dur- 

 ing the last year — the survival of the unlike. 



This phrase — the survival of the unlike — expresses no new truth, but I 

 hope that it may present the old truth of vicarious or non-designed evolu- 

 tion in a new light. It defines the fittest to be the unlike. You will 

 recall that in this paper I have dwelt upon the origin and progress of dif- 

 ferences rather than of definite or positive characters. I am so fully con- 

 vinced that, in the plant creation, a new character is useful to the species 

 because it is unlike its kin, that the study of diff"erence between individuals 

 has come to be, for me, the one absorbing and controlling thought in the 

 contemplation of the progress of life. These differences arise as a result 

 of every impinging force — soil, weather, climate, food, training, conflict 

 with fellows, the strain and stress of wind and wave and insect visitors — 

 as a complex resultant of many antecedent external forces, the eflfects of 

 crossing, and also as the result of the accumulated force of mere growth ; 

 they are indefinite, non-designed, an expression of all the various 

 influences to which the passive vegetable organism is or has been exposed ; 

 those difl'erences which are most unlike their fellows or their parents find 

 the places of least conflict, and persist because they thrive best and there- 

 by impress themselves best upon their off'spring. Thereby there is a con- 

 stant tendency for new and divergent lines to strike ofi", and these lines, 

 as they become accented, develop into what we, for convenience sake, 

 have called species. There are, therefore, as many species as there are 

 unlike conditions in physical and environmental nature, and in propor- 

 tion as the conditions are unlike and local are the species well defined. 

 But to nature, perfect adaptation is the end ; she knows nothing, pe)' se, 



