220 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION 



II. Its Methods of Internal Readjustment and 

 Betterment 



In this system of growth, as well as in every other, 

 the vital problems of a large body cannot be solved in 

 the same ways as those of a small body. Hence growth 

 cannot go on unless concurrent local readjustments and 

 betterments are made within the sytsem to meet the 

 new conditions created by its own growth. The cri- 

 terion of the Tightness of these readjustments is their 

 creative returns. Here, as elsewhere, in accordance 

 with the universal constructive law, those organs which 

 better cooperate with one another, or serve one another, 

 and thereby the whole, the longer endure and grow so 

 much the more; those which do less than that, dimin- 

 ish, or give way to other organs more happily situated 

 on their respective gradients. 



To the morphologist, or to the student of animal 

 architecture, the evolution of the great arthropod-ver- 

 tebrate stock, where this method of growth and or- 

 ganic readjustment prevails, is therefore the age-long 

 history of more or less intermittent increments in bod- 

 ily volume and organic power due to the successive ad- 

 dition of new groups of metameres at the posterior end 

 of the body; the local rise, decline, or combination of 

 metameres; the localization of certain functions and 

 organs, or the apparent transfer of them from one po- 

 sition in the body to another; the up-building of new 

 and the down-breaking of old partitions, and the conse- 

 quent opening, closing, diverting, dividing, or enlarge- 

 ment of the channels of exchange! 



Whenever these local readjustments are of excep- 

 tional cooperative value, just as in commercial or po- 



