34 THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNLIKE. [l. 



its psychological significance, for if the way becomes 

 dark the wanderer invokes the aid of this ignis fatuus 

 to cut short his difficulties. Sir William Thomson 

 suggests that the basis of life may have come to earth 

 upon a meteor, and Brinton proposes that man is a 

 sport from some of the lower creation. It is certainly a 

 strange conception which ascribes a self- centered and 

 self-sufficient power to the tree of life, and then, at the 

 very critical points, adopts a wholly extraneous force, 

 and one which is plainly but a survival of the old cata- 

 clysmic doctrines; and it is the stranger, too, be- 

 cause such tj^pe of explanation is not suggested by ob- 

 servation or experiment, but simply by an insuperable 

 barrier of our present ignorance of natural processes. 

 If evolution is true at all, there is reason to suppose 

 that it extends from beginning to finish of creation, 

 and the stopping of the process at obscure intervals 

 can be only a temporary satisfaction to one who is not 

 yet fully committed to the eternal truth of ascent. 

 The tree of life has no doubt grown steadily and grad- 

 ually, and the same forces, variously modified by the 

 changing physical conditions of the earth, have run on 

 with slow but mighty energy until the present time. 

 Any radical change in the plan would have defeated it, 

 and any mere accidental circumstance is too trivial to 

 be considered as a modifying influence of the great on- 

 ward movement of creation, particularly when it as- 

 sumes to account for the appearing of the very cap- 

 stone of the whole mighty structure. 



Bear with me if I recite a few specific examples of 

 the survival of the unlike, or of the importance, to or- 

 ganic types, of gradually widening differences. Illus- 

 trations might be drawn from every field of the organic 



