108 EVOLUTION 



more safely begin by recognizing this very 

 tendency in ourselves. For who does not 

 at times look forward to a more peaceful, 

 a more prosperous and assured period, in 

 which, storms and trials over, we are to 

 settle down, snug, cosy and warm, there to 

 eat of the fat, and drink of the sweet, and 

 to enjoy what may remain to us of life? 

 And what parent but wishes for his child a 

 safer, easier, richer life than his own? Little 

 wonder, then, that the political economist, 

 who has for the most part but massed popu- 

 lar opinion into his pretentious but inchoate 

 would-be science, has treated this scheme 

 of life as the natural one, and confirmed his 

 public more and more into it as the practical 

 one as well. For . your would-be practical 

 man, slave to that wildest, strangest, most 

 impossible of all theories — the theory that 

 there are no theories — ever falls victim to 

 the surface plausibility of the crudest theory 

 going. 



Whereas the student who has seen crusta- 

 cean larvae in all the activity of their youth, 

 bright-eyed, free-swimming, and thereafter 

 settling down into barnacles upon the rock, 

 or, seeking food and safety at the expense 

 of their larger and stronger active kindred, 

 settling further down into mere blood-bags, 

 mere egg-bags, "sans eyes, sans ears, sans 



