166 Tlie Evolution of Arms and Arraor. 



beasts, in which to prepare for war, it is not strange that 

 what was fitted in part for each of these states should have 

 proved, as a whole, the fittest to survive. 



Beyond this, just in proportion as a live thing was 

 protected by outward armor, either against the elements or 

 against its foes, the stimulus for its interior development 

 wjis taken away, the nourishing qualities of its food went 

 to its outside parts, and the freedom of its circulatory 

 system, always needed in the making of a highly diifei'enti- 

 ated organism, was sacrificed in the interest of its harder 

 shell. It is not improbable that the starting-point of the 

 whole divergence between the animal and vegetable king- 

 doms, now so broad, was that the original protistic proto- 

 plasm out of which they both came, identical in all other 

 respects, was a little more solidified in the one case than in 

 the other, as it still is in their germs, that early outside 

 protection being fatal to all animal-life development. And 

 when Nature surrounds any creature at its birth with an 

 encasement that is a guard without effort on its own part 

 from all harm, as with the snail, oyster and clam, or 

 develops its teeth, claws and bulk so enormously by inheri- 

 tance that their mere display protects it from all ordinary 

 assaults, Avhat inducement does the creature have for in- 

 terior growth, and what sustenance have left for it even 

 should the need arise ? It is the animals whose very exist- 

 ence depends on the completeness and activity of their 

 internal equipment, on their quickness of motion, keen- 

 ness of sense, and cunning of brain, rather than on their 

 outside covering, it is these that will necessarily make 

 the most of every variation in the direction of such ])0wers, 

 using them more and more, and be the ones to mount up at 

 last from moner into man. Historically, in the animal 

 kingdom, it is out of the bodily weakest that have come 

 the mentally strongest. Lacking talons, they have de- 

 veloped talents ; unable to throttle, they have learned to 

 think. Danger has been their school ; difficulty their 

 teacher ; and, instead of yielding to the arsenal of outward 

 weapons arrayed against them, they have turned them into 

 helpers, sharpened their wits against the very teeth of 

 tigers, made the ferocity of the hyena and bear contribute 

 to their fineness of nerve aiul sense, and the portion of 

 Nature's goods that Megalosaur and Megathere consumed 

 with riotous living in the making of brawii, they have 

 used with econoniv in tlie niakintr of brain. 



