COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



man there is, however, one important differ- 

 ence. Selection by man tends to produce vari- 

 eties adapted to satisfy human necessities or 

 inclinations, and it has no direct reference to 

 the maintenance of the species. Such abnor- 

 mities as the pouter and tumbler pigeons could 

 not be sustained in a state of nature — and 

 hence, when domesticated animals are turned 

 loose, they are apt to revert to something like 

 their ancestral type,^ else they are exterminated 

 by races better adapted to wild life. But nat- 

 ural selection, working with the sternest of 

 methods, saves from the general slaughter only 

 those individuals which can best take care of 

 themselves, and thus maintains each species in 

 adaptation to its environment. The wonderful 

 harmonies in the organic world, which a crude 

 philosophy explained as the achievement of 

 creative contrivance, are therefore due to the 

 continued survival of the fittest and the con- 

 tinued slaughter of the less adapted plants and 

 animals. 



Now if the geography and meteorology of 

 the earth were ever-constant, if the nature of 

 the soil, the amount of moisture, the density 

 of the atmosphere, and the intensity of solar 

 radiance were everywhere to remain forever un- 



1 This fact, which has often been alleged by superficial 

 critics as an obstacle to the Darwinian theory, is thus in reality 

 implied by that theory. 



i8 



