UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 



foreshadows these things? Or in organized matter 

 itself? Could we infer the bird from the reptile? or 

 man from the unreasoning brute? 



Even if we accept Weismann's conception of 

 natural selection as like unto a man on a journey in 

 a pathless wilderness, do we not still want some ex- 

 planation of why he has undertaken the journey and 

 what his ultimate goal may be? A man lost in the 

 woods or in the desert wanders blindly on in a circle 

 and gets nowhere. Could evolution ever have ar- 

 rived at man, had not man, in some way beyond our 

 power to grasp, been potential in the primal organ- 

 izing impulse? And so of all other forms? But 

 Weismann's traveler does not know where he is go- 

 ing; he goes where "the most tortuous and winding 

 route leads him." There is no intelligence in the 

 matter, there is only blind groping. Then Weis- 

 mann's traveler starts on his journey as one of the 

 very low forms of life, and by sheer luck, and by 

 blindly running the gantlet of all the countless 

 hazards of the long geologic ages, he ends as man. 

 Other forms on the same journey, through the law 

 of probability, end as reptiles, or birds, or butter- 

 flies, or quadrupeds. It is all a chance throw of the 

 dice. A stream of water starting on the mountain- 

 side takes the easiest way and reaches the river or 

 the lake or the sea. It is all a matter of physics. 

 Whether it flow north or south or east or west de- 

 pends upon the lay of the land. All its loopings and 



264 



