Place of Definition, etc., m Philosophical Biology 133 



on a sand bank for hours at a time without so much as 

 flopping its tail. What a striking case of willing to 

 power! And what determination of a servant to be a 

 master ! Or if Nietzsche by chance ever looked through 

 a microscope at the slow come-and-go of protoplasm 

 confined within the cell membrane in a hair of a spider- 

 lily, what a convincing proof of "will to power" and 

 "desire for mastery" he had before him ! 



And one finds illustrations and arguments quite as 

 convincing almost every time he consults any orthodox 

 Selectionist. For instance, such a biologist will watch 

 with you a hornbill, a bird the size of a hen with a bill 

 as large as the horn of a two-year-old bull, as the crea- 

 ture strives to get its bill out of its way so it can see its 

 food, and then displays its ingenuity in getting the 

 food far enough back in its immobile, bony mouth to 

 enable it to swallow the morsel, and will explain to you 

 without a smile how this bird and its ancestors have been 

 able to survive in the struggle for existence because of 

 the masterful bill ! Or, coming down to pure and over- 

 whelming logic, such a biologist wih 1 affirm (still without 

 a smile) that you are bound to accept his explanation 

 of the hornbill's bill unless you have some better expla- 

 nation to offer! And he will go yet further (still in 

 dead earnest) and tell you he, and not you, must be the 

 judge of which explanation is better. A very rudimen- 

 tary sense of humor is another and by no means an 

 unimportant trait-in-common between Nietzscheans and 

 many speculative biologists. 



