246 EVOLUTION 



through its ever recurrent falls; and if it 

 applies equally to the origin of classes and 

 orders, of genera and of species, why not also 

 to the varieties and mutations which natural- 

 ists are discussing, for the most part too 

 externally, at the present day? 



Summary and Conclusions. — As in plants 

 the species-maintaining functions prepon- 

 derate over the individual ones, so that 

 from annual to agave the plant must flower 

 although it die, so the same preponderance 

 appears in animals. The "self-interest" in 

 which the utilitarian economists found the 

 all-sufficient spring of action, and which 

 naturalists too long and too uncritically 

 adopted from these (whence Huxley's "glad- 

 iator's show"), turns out to be enlightened 

 by family interest, species interest, however 

 sub-conscious. The traditional primary 

 insistence upon the individual competition 

 for food, and the very subordinate and tardy 

 recognition of the importance of sexual and 

 social co-operation, are also traceable to a 

 confusion of thought — that of putting the 

 nutritive factor "in the first place" because 

 it precedes the reproductive in time; whereas 

 the organism enters upon reproduction, 

 and so cedes the preponderance, "the first 

 place," to the species-regarding functions. 

 That increase of the reproductive sacrifice 



