THE WONDER OF LIFE 639 



selection, for it does not simply submit to the apparently 

 inevitable. It often evades its fate by a change of policy 

 or of environment ; it compromises, it experiments ; it 

 is full of device and endeavour. It is certainly much more 

 than a pawn in the hands of Fate or Environment ; it 

 plays its own game. Besides the variability or inventive- 

 ness, which, from the germ-cells outwards, offers solutions 

 to life's problems, there is the organism's utilisation of these 

 assets, and there is the equally fundamental entailment or 

 hereditary registration of the successful new departures 

 without which evolution were impossible. 



The Continuity of Evolution. Immense gaps in our 

 knowledge are immediately apparent when we inquire 

 into the origin of living organisms upon the earth, the 

 beginnings of intelligent behaviour, the origin of Verte- 

 brates, the emergence of Man, and so on. We know very 

 little as yet in regard to the way in which any of the ' big 

 lifts ' in evolution have come about, and yet we believe 

 in the continuity of the process. That is implied in our 

 ideal concept of evolution, which we accept as a working 

 hypothesis. It is not very easy to say what it is that is 

 continuous, but we mean in part that there is at no stage 

 any intrusion of extraneous factors. But this continues 

 to raise in the minds of many the difficulty that the results 

 seem much too large for their antecedents. Can we believe 

 that the world of life, with its climax in Man, has been 

 evolved from a nebulous mass ? 



Let us recall Huxley's famous statement of his radical 

 mechanism : 



' If the fundamental proposition of evolution is true, 

 namely, that the entire world, animate and inanimate, is 

 the result of the mutual interaction, according to definite 



