68 NO STRUGGLE NO SELECTION 



then does Darwin mean by affirming that injurious 

 variations are rigidly destroyed, seeing that they grow 

 up as fast as they are destroyed, and are not, more- 

 over, doomed to destruction more than other variations 

 that go to the wall in the struggle for existence ? 

 But it may be observed that in the action of the 

 two factors of Natural Selection, the advantageous 

 and the injurious variations, there is no evolutional 

 advance achieved. The survivors are always the 

 fittest in their generation to survive : the average 

 of the reproduction, with all beneath and all above 

 the average, are swept away, until the few fittest to 

 survive are reached ; but when we reach the survivors 

 there is nothing that gives us any reason to infer that 

 their average is raised from generation to generation. 



I do not here press the argument of the previous 

 chapter, that all that we know of Nature's ways and 

 methods seems to assure us that in the survival of 

 those individuals who live to procreate their kind, 

 she does not call in individual variations to do any 

 part of her work, and that those who survive are 

 not a selected class, but represent the average of her 

 reproduction, as I desire to keep apart from the 

 former the argument of this chapter, which is to 

 demonstrate that individual variations can in no case 

 prove evolutionary material. I shall now explain 

 the action through illimitable time of Darwin's evolu- 

 tionary factor, the individual variation or difference 

 that appears in the course cf many successive 

 generations. 



