INSTINCTS OF NEUTER INSECTS. 249 



probably, than strokes of ill luck have counteracted) 

 but to strokes of cunning to a sense of need, and to 

 study of the past and present which have given shrewd 

 people a key with which to unlock the chambers of 

 the future. 



Further, Mr. Darwin himself says ("Plants and 

 Animals under -Domestication," ii. p. 237, ed. 1875) : 



"But I think we must take a broader view and 

 conclude that organic beings when subjected during 

 several generations to any change whatever in their 

 conditions tend to vary : tlie kind of variation which 

 ensues depending in most cases in afar higher degree on 

 the nature or constitution of the being, than on the nature 

 of the changed conditions." And this we observe in man. 

 The history of a man prior to his birth is more im- 

 portant as far as his success or failure goes than his 

 surroundings after birth, important though these may 

 indeed be. The able man rises in spite of a thousand 

 hindrances, the fool fails in spite of every advantage. 

 ' Natural selection," however, does not make either the 

 able man or the fool. It only deals with him after 

 other causes have made him, and would seem in the 

 end to amount to little more than to a statement of the 

 fact that when variations have arisen they will accumu- 

 late. One cannot look, as has already been said, for 

 the origin of species in that part of the course of nature 

 which settles the preservation or extinction of variations 

 which have already arisen from some unknown cause, 

 but one must look for it in the causes that have 

 led to variation at all. These causes must get, as it 

 were, behind the back of "natural selection," which 13 



