76 UNIVERSAL EVOLUTION 



the eye of man, new forms, before unknown, without 

 the interposition of special creation. 



TRUE SPECIES ARE WILD. The great number of slight 

 variations, and individual differences, occurring in 

 domestic production do make the fact stand out boldly, 

 that organisms are very plastic to hereditary experi- 

 ments. If it is so in domesticity, it will be more so, 

 in the wild state. In nature, the environment of an 

 animal, is more variable, and trying to the organism, 

 than in domesticity. Under the care of man, animals 

 are less liable to accidents, and if not used for food, 

 more liable to die a natural death. They are protected 

 from their natural enemies. Those that survive in the 

 wild state are certainly more liable to be the survival 

 of the fittest, for the coddling by man results in pre- 

 serving both weak and strong; but nature does no 

 coddling. We know that an immensely larger number 

 of individuals are born in nature than can possibly 

 survive. So that, it is here, that the true test of 

 natural selection must be made, where the factors en- 

 tering into the test are so many and so acute ; that the 

 investigator has a wide field of complex and obscure 

 phenomena from which to draw his conclusions. It is 

 here, that organisms having any variation giving them 

 an advantage in the struggle, would be the ones to 

 thrive and procreate. A variation, injurious, would 

 greatly handicap the individual possessing it; would 

 soon die, and leave the field to the better equipped. 

 That is the nature of natural selection. It is the de- 

 scription of a condition, not a force. It is not creative 

 like the causes of variation and heredity. It is the 

 survival and the thriving of the well fitted, and the 

 dying out, for the lack of natural tools useful in pro- 

 ducing the necessaries of life, of the deficient. 



