volved in a warfare that is tragically one-sided; and it 

 must prevail over all its many foes or it must acknowledge 

 defeat and pay the penalty for unconditional surrender, 

 which is death, so stern and unyielding is that vast total- 

 ity we individualize as the environment. The generalized 

 biological formula, then, for the turmoil of nature is 

 adaptation=life. 



Here then is the heart of the mystery. How has this 

 universal condition of adaptation been brought about? 

 What have animals within them that might determine their 

 greater or less efficiency? What external influences, if 

 any, are capable of directing the efforts of living creatures 

 to meet their enemies? How are modifications perpetuated 

 when they have arisen? To many of these questions Dar- 

 win, Weismann, Mendel, De Vries, and others have found 

 answers, not complete or perfect, it is true, but they have 

 relegated to the past the former reply that supernatural 

 causes must be invoked to account for nature. Science is 

 convinced that the study of nature's workings at the 

 present time reveals natural factors which are competent 

 to account for much of the wonderful process of evolu- 

 tion. 



As everyone knows, the works of Darwin inaugurated 

 our recent era in biology. In 1858, Darwin and Wallace 

 announced the doctrine of natural selection, and in 1859, 

 Darwin published the "Origin of Species," a book that has 

 proved a veritable Magna Charta of intellectual liberties, 

 for as no other single document before or since it has released 

 the thoughts of men from the trammels of unreasoned con- 

 servatism and dogmatism. And its influence has been felt 

 far beyond the borders of biological science it has ex- 

 tended to the very confines of organized knowledge every- 

 where. But it is a mistaken popular notion, and one of the 

 hardest to drive from the mind of the layman in science, 

 that Darwin founded the doctrine of evolution by the book 



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