THE PRICE OF DEVELOPMENT 



It is easy to see why the wild plants run out the 

 cultivated ones — the latter are the result of arti- 

 ficial selection. No favor has been shown the wild 

 ones, and hence only the most vigorous have sur- 

 vived. The cultivated plants always have a greater 

 burden to bear than the wild ones, and man helps 

 them to bear it, or, rather, he saddles it upon them. 

 The cultivated races of man have burdens to bear 

 also, much greater than the savage tribes, but this 

 is more than made up to them by their superior 

 brain power, which brain power again has come 

 about in the struggle for existence. Wild tribes have 

 also been under the discipline of natural selection, 

 but by reason of some obscure factors of race or 

 climate or geography they have not profited as 

 have the European and Asiatic races. Their moral 

 natures are more rudimentary. 



Doubtless some obscure or unknown factors in 

 the original germ-cells, far back in biological times, 

 caused the divergence and splitting-up of animal 

 forms, and gave to one an impulse that carried it 

 higher in the scale of development than its fellows, 

 just as the same thing happens in human families 

 in our own times. Why some creatures are higher 

 and some are lower, why some eventuated in the 

 bird and some in toad and frog and snake and 

 lizard, is one of the mysteries. In seeking the ex- 

 planation of these things on natural grounds we 

 are compelled to resort to the fertile expedient of 



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