126 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION 



surance of right living that they have acquired great 

 regularity and stability. It is along the frontiers of 

 an expanding life, or wherever young life is experi- 

 menting with new combinations, invading new terri- 

 tories, and adopting new methods of living, that life 

 fluctuates most rapidly, or flickers with its minor suc- 

 cesses and failures. There its aims are exploratory, 

 the failures are many, and the gains may be exceedingly 

 small, or fleeting. Once perhaps in an aeon, or in a 

 great geologic era, is some unusually constructive in- 

 novation crowned with a new class of enduring progeny. 

 The internal administration of every individual life 

 is insured by several sets of mingled, or overlapping 

 agencies: (i) In part by better "heredity," or by the 

 conservation and usage of right constructive materials. 



(2) In part by better self-insulation and self-protec- 

 tion, or by that discriminating appropriation, exclu- 

 sion, and expulsion which tend to create and main- 

 tain a better internal medium for the conduct of life. 



(3) In part by larger endowments. The endowments 

 may provide an active capital for consumption during 

 the early stages of life, or a regular income in the form 

 of parental and social services rightly performed for 

 the individual at prescribed periods in its development. 



(4) In part by a more rigid discipline which begins 

 in the egg and extends throughout life. This disci- 

 pline is the product of definite physical and chemical 

 conditions established within the growing body, which 

 compel life to follow approved channels in a prescribed 

 manner and in a prescribed sequence. 



Thus the internal administration of all forms of 

 life, as for example a plant, an insect, a human being, 

 a city, or a great institution, is very largely self-insured, 



