68 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION 



making better usage of different materials. Wood, 

 flint, bones, copper, iron, steel, and aluminum are ma- 

 terials which in this way may become fit, and ultimately 

 unfit, for special constructive purposes. 



It was, doubtless, a happy combination of chance 

 events that led someone, somehow and somewhere, to 

 discover the right way to make fire. But there is noth- 

 ing, in that sense, accidental in the attributes of fire, 

 or in the attributes of those things influenced by fire, 

 or in the ways they are influenced by it. Nor is there 

 anything accidental in the fact that once the right way 

 of liberating fire was discovered, the latent fabric of 

 civilization itself was set free and progressively upbuilt 

 by its services. Through the more or less durable fit- 

 ness and adaptability of such agencies, and these cumul- 

 ative cooperations, the great currents of nature's crea- 

 tive power have themselves been profoundly influenced, 

 and new kinds of fitness and adaptability successively 

 created. 



V. The Measure of Organic Fitness 



It may be urged that the bacteria are just as fit and 

 well adapted for self-preservation and growth as the 

 elephants; or that a yeast plant is just as successful in 

 its way of living as an orchid is in its way. That is 

 true. But the measure of life. is not in efficiency alone, 

 or in size, or in fitness. Every cooperative system must 

 be efficient to the point of self-preservation, else it 

 would not exist. The question is, what kind of fitness 

 and adaptation leads or has led to larger constructive 

 results, to a greater sum of cooperating services; to a 

 more extensive system of conveyance ; to better contact 



