44 THE SURVIVAL OP THE UNLIKE. [l. 



Pernaps the best illustration which I can bring you 

 of the origin of the unlike by means of environmental 

 conditions, and the survival of some of this unlikeness in 

 the battle for life, is the development of the winter qui- 

 escence of plants. What means all this bursting verdure 

 of the liquid April days? Why this annually returning 

 miracle of the sudden expansion of the leaf and flower 

 from the lifeless twigs? Were plants always so? Were 

 they designed to pass so much of their existence in this 

 quiescent and passive condition? No! The first plants 

 had no well-defined cycles, and they were born to live, 

 not to die. There were probably no alternations of sea- 

 sons or even of days, in the primordial world. The ac- 

 count in Genesis places the creation of plants in the third 

 cosmogonic day, and the setting of "lights in the firma- 

 ment of heaven " to "be for signs, and for seasons, and 

 for days, and years," in the fourth day. As late as the 

 Carboniferous time, according to Dana, the globe "was 

 nowhere colder than the modern temperate zone, or be- 

 low a mean temperature of 60° F." The earth had be- 

 come wonderfully diverse by the close of the Cretaceous 

 time, and the cycads and their kin retreated from the 

 poles. Plants grew the year round; and as physical 

 conditions became diverse and the conflict of existence 

 increased, the older and the weaker died. So a limit to 

 duration, — that is, death, — became impressed upon the 

 individuals of the creation; for death, as seen by the 

 evolutionist, is not an original property of life-matter, 

 but is an acquired character, a result of the survival of 

 the fittest. The earth was, perhaps, ages old, even after 

 life began, before it saw a natural death; but without 

 death all things must finally have come to a standstill. 

 When it became possible to sweep away the old types, 



