THE WONDER OF LIFE 637 



of the germ-plasm, we must admit that one generation 

 is not personally identical with preceding or succeeding 

 generations. 



But the radical difference is surely this, that in any stage 

 in racial evolution there are numerous individuals that do 

 not figure in the final result ; they are outside the pale of 

 success ; they die before their time or they have small 

 families ; in any case they and theirs are eliminated in 

 Nature's sifting. They do not count. They are ' cast as 

 nothing to the void '. It is easy enough to find in some in- 

 dividual life-histories, complicated by metamorphosis and 

 the like, instances of the suppression or elimination of parts, 

 but there is nothing in development comparable to the 

 staking of individual lives and losing of them that has 

 gone on throughout the whole of that sublime and romantic 

 adventure which we call organic evolution. 



It seems to us therefore that it would be more accurate 

 to speak of the development of the earth, the development 

 of the solar system, and so on, keeping the term evolution 

 for the organic and the super- organic. Better still would 

 it be to find another term for the sequence of changes in an 

 inorganic system ; and some distinguished men of science 

 have recognized this in speaking of ' the story of the 

 heavens ', ' the story of the earth ', and so forth. 



This question of words matters a good deal. As Hobbes 

 finely said, words are only intellectual counters with which 

 the wise do reckon, but they are the money of fools ; 

 yet words make fools of us all. The fundamentally im- 

 portant thing is to avoid verbally identifying processes 

 which are really very different. In the succession of inor- 

 ganic changes, there are no alternatives ; every stage is the 

 necessary outcome of its antecedents ; all is mechanically 



