The Evolution of Arms arid Ariaor. 161 



the result of these long experiments as to what are fittest, 

 and have helped their users to be fittest also, is not only 

 of itself one of the most beautiful chapters in the Book of 

 Evolution, but one that pours a great flood of practical wis- 

 dom on the problems of our time as to the true principles to 

 be followed in securing national, social and even religious 

 survival and supremacy. 



The first effort of her Vulcan fingers was in the line of 

 protective armor pure and simple, the encasement of 

 animals and plants in a mere hard outside covering. It 

 is what the exposure alone of their original protoplasm to 

 water, sun and air, aided by the secretion of mineral matter 

 on the surface, and intensified by the survival and repro- 

 duction of the animals and plants which had it most, 

 would tend naturally, in strict accordance with Darwin's 

 laws, to produce ; and it is now seen to advantage in the 

 sea-urchin and star-fish among Kadiates, in the oyster 

 and clam among Mollusks, in the turtle and alligator among 

 Vertebrates, in the eggs of birds, and, to some extent, in 

 the skin and hair of all animals. 



It was a form, however, to which Nature could not con- 

 fine herself, especially in the animal kingdom. If live 

 things were to live, either on each other or on vegetables, 

 they obviously must have some means of breaking through 

 each other's hard covers and getting at their inside meat. 

 The means came to them in the form of cilia, tentacles, 

 suckers, claws, mouths, horns, jaws, tails, tusks, teeth, begin- 

 ning, perhaps, in such mere thread-like extensions of the 

 inner protoplasm as are now seen in the rhizopods, and 

 culminating in the apparatus of such magnificent vertebrate 

 carnivora as the lion and the tiger. 



But such weapons alone, with only the old protoplasmic 

 bodies to wield them, would not have been enough ; would 

 indeed have been of less value to them than even their old 

 outside covering. To have them of any real use Nature 

 had to develop, along with them, bones, muscles, nerves, 

 senses, brains; and, in some of their owners, the habit and 

 power of association, all that constitutes a highly organ- 

 ized internal structure. These were organs and faculties 

 which became, in their turn, a new species of armor still 

 more interior; became at any rate what had the same use 

 as armor, the quickness of eye that could discern the 



