322 THE BIOLOGY OF THE SEASONS 



going, and these lost races have been blotted out as though 

 they had never been. We cannot console ourselves with 

 any notion that such disappearance is a misnomer for 

 transmutation into some nobler form ; that may be true 

 of certain species, which have direct descendants to-day, 

 but it is not true of what we call lost races. Nor is there 

 consolation in the notion that the atoms which were once 

 wrapped up in that whilom bundle of life known as the 

 ichthyosaurus may now be part and parcel of us ; for we 

 feel that those particular combinations which we have called 

 lost races those smiles of creative genius have gone, gone 

 as utterly as the snow-wreaths of yester year. 



Thus from the elimination now observable around us 

 in this wintry season our thoughts naturally pass to the 

 great world-wide process, continuous since life began, 

 which embraces us also in its inexorable sifting. It does 

 not, indeed, explain us, nor the organisms we know, any 

 more than the pruning-hook explains the tree ; but given 

 life and growth, we cannot understand our history or that 

 of living creatures apart from elimination. In short, we 

 need our Winter to explain our Summer, and this perhaps 

 is the only consolation which the biologist can suggest to 

 the discontented, that the alternation of Summer and 

 Winter is part of the mechanism which has made the 

 history of the world a progressive development. 



