430 LAWS OF MULTIPLICATION. 



processes by which individual life is completed and main 

 tained; and enlarging the meaning of the word Genesis so 

 as to include all processes aiding the formation and perfecting 

 of new individuals; we see that the two are fundamentally 

 opposed. Assuming other things to remain the same 

 assuming that environing conditions as to climate, food, 

 enemies, &c., continue constant; then, inevitably, every 

 higher degree of individual evolution is followed by a lower 

 degree of race-multiplication, and vice versa. Progress in 

 bulk, complexity, or activity, involves retrogress in fertility; 

 and progress in fertility involves retrogress in bulk, com 

 plexity, or activity. 



This statement needs a slight qualification. For reasons 

 to be hereafter assigned, the relation described is never com 

 pletely maintained; and in the small departure from it, we 

 shall find a remarkable self-acting tendency to further the 

 supremacy of the most-developed types. Here, however, this 

 hint must suffice : explanation would carry us too far out of 

 our line of argument. For the present it will not lead us 

 astray if we regard this inverse variation of Individuation 

 and Genesis as exact. 



328. Thus, then, the condition which each race must 

 fulfil if it is to survive, is a condition which, in the nature of 

 things, it ever tends to fulfil. In the last chapter we saw 

 that a species cannot be maintained unless the power to 

 preserve individual life and the power to propagate other 

 individuals vary inversely. And here we have seen that, 

 irrespective of an end to be subserved, these powers cannot 

 do other than vary inversely. On the one hand, given a 

 certain totality of destroying forces with which the species 

 has to contend; and in proportion as its members have 

 severally but small ability to resist these forces, it is requisite 

 that they should have great ability to form new individuals, 

 and vice versa. On the other hand, given the quantity of 

 force, absorbed as food or otherwise, which the species can 



