GENETICS 123 



factors of evolution. The word, however, contains the 

 tacit implication that the building up of heritable physio- 

 logical "funds" is of a similar nature to the building 

 up of "capital" in commerce and industries, or the wealth 

 bestowed in the endowment of persons or institutions. It is not 

 every race of the past that has been able to establish adequate 

 " funds " for a sufficient biological endowment of progeny or 

 to replenish its patrimony of ancestral dynamics as fast as it 

 was drawn upon. Here, again, the analogy between organic 

 and human failures is very close, and strikingly suggests a 

 universal principle. 



Many animals have become extinct without leaving 

 modified blood-descendants. Thus, for instance, the 

 megatherium and other allied monsters, as Darwin tells us in 

 the Origin of Species, have become wholly extinct and 

 left no progeny. I have explained this failure as due 

 to loss of symbiotics, and there is plentiful evidence to 

 show that the similar failure of many ancient and compara- 

 tively recent races of man is due to the same cause. It is 

 clear that the laws laid down by the great law-givers of old : 

 Moses, Buddha, Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Plato, Jesus, St. Paul, 

 Mohammed, etc., by enjoining mutual forbearance, restraint 

 and bodily and social hygiene, in reality all aimed in various 

 degrees at the maintenance or restoration of physiological and 

 symbiogenetic integrity. 



In Nature as in human society it is true that many are 

 called but few are chosen, but to be chosen is a matter of 

 qualification and not of accident or Providence, as Addison and 

 others seem to have thought : 



If Providence shows itself even in the blemishes of these creatures, 

 how much more does it discover itself in their several endowments, 

 according to the condition in which they are posted. 



That there had to be adequate basic dynamics, if certain 

 primordial individuals or species were to be charged with 

 sufficient powers to become the progenitors of long future lines 



