BIONOMICS 275 



members, every species owes to certain more indirect actions of 

 the external world those energies which enable it to perpetuate 

 itself in successive generations." 



But he does not realise the extent to w r hich the fact that 

 every organism is thus evolved in correlation with the world 

 (" mit der Welt verwachsen," as Fechner says), constitutes an 

 additional perpetual and powerful directive influence in 

 accordance with the degree and value of this correlatedness. 

 He says : ' ' When we remember that the force which keeps 

 the Earth in its orbit is the gravitation of each particle in the 

 Earth towards every one of the group of particles existing 

 91,000,000 of miles off, we cannot reasonably doubt that each 

 unit in an organism acts, by its polar forces, on all the other 

 units, and is reacted on by them." 



What he omits is the consideration of the fact that the 

 force of organic solidarity acts in a somewhat similar way in 

 its effects upon organisms, and that this largely accounts for the 

 "tolerably uniform conditions maintained by a species in spite 

 of the phenomena of variations." If we supply the bio-economic 

 addenda, how true it is also as he remarks in the 

 " Preliminary " to his outline on The Evolution of Life, that 

 "there is an ensemble of vital phenomena presented by each 

 organism in the course of its growth, development, and decay; 

 and there is an ensemble of vital phenomena presented by the 

 organic world as a whole. Neither of these can be properly 

 dealt with apart from the other." "What interpretation we 

 put on the facts of structure and function in each living body 

 depends entirely on our conception of the mode in which living 

 bodies in general have originated." 



L. DISTRIB UTION. 



Here Spencer touches upon the problem of distribution in 

 Time, and raises the important questions of fitness, of creative 

 skill, and of extinction. 



There arise the questions why during nearly the whole of that 

 vast period geologically recorded, have there existed none of those 



