rHE SURVIVAL OF "THE FlT'TESr m 



allowed brief progress. The internal locomotive skeleton of 

 chordata was difficult, slow of development and in conferring 

 advantages, but full of almost endless possibilities of loco- 

 motion, sense and brain. Its advantages revealed themselves 

 only after long and wearisome experimenting. The mollusk 

 was shovelling gold out of a pocket, the vertebrate working a 

 fissure vein where the ore, poor at the surface, grew richer as 

 it went deeper. 



We remember that the amphibian under great difficulties 

 and disadvantages was on his way to warm blood, a better 

 brain and freer life. These all came very slowly, without 

 observation. The disadvantages seemed at first greater than 

 the gains. The same . is true of mammalian structure and 

 habit in general and particularly of primates. 



It is evident that we cannot distinguish too sharply and em- 

 phatically between dominance and fitness. The dominant 

 forms, hulking reptiles or sleek cats, are those which are reap- 

 ing to the full the use of some power already attained at the 

 expense or to the neglect of some higher, deep-seated power, 

 as yet very incompletely developed and offering few tangible 

 gains, but of far greater capacity. They gain present pros- 

 perity at the expense of all future progress. Such prosperity 

 and dominance must be brief. The experiment can end only 

 in bankruptcy and failure. Reptile and cat must in time yield 

 to the brainier form, but not in one year or millennium. If we 

 focus our attention on any one point of time alone, present or 

 past, if we are near-sighted, the dominant form will surely 

 appear to us to be the fittest, although its doom is sure and 

 downfall near. 



The fittest is the form which maintains and improves the 

 best attainments of its ancestors and puts its chief develop- 

 mental energy into the organs of highest capacity and pos- 

 sibihties. It lives up to and expresses the last term of the 

 logic of evolution. But such organs, or similar institutions, 

 are necessarily complex and of slow growth. At first the re- 

 wards of progress are small, the disadvantages and cost of their 

 development are evident and not few. The fittest usually 



