464 FACTORS OF ORGANIC EVOLUTION. 



I mast now hasten to anticipate an objection to my x>'tirase whicli may 

 arise in your minds. I have said that when characters are nulil^e exist- 

 ing characters tbey stand a chance of persisting; but I do not desire 

 to say that they are useful in proportion as they are unlike their kin. 

 I want to express my conviction that mere sports are rarely useful. 

 TLese arc no doubt the result of very unusual or comj)lex stimuli, or of 

 unwonted refrangibility of the energy of growth, and not having been 

 induced by conditions which act uniformly over a course of time, they 

 are likely to be transient. I fully accept Cope's remark that there is 

 "no ground for believing that sports have any considerable influence 

 on the course of evolution. * * * The method of evolution has 

 apparently been one of successful increment and decrement of parts 

 along definite lines." Among domestic animals and plants the selec- 

 tion and breeding of sports, or very unusual and marked variations, 

 has been a leading cause of their strange and diverse evolution. In 

 fact, it is in this particular thing that the work of the breeder and the 

 gardener is most unlike the work of nature. But in feral conditions, 

 the sport may be likened to an attribute out of place; and I imagine 

 that its chief effect upon the phylogeny of a race — if any effect it have — 

 is in giving rise in its turn to a brood of less erratic unlikenesses. Tliis 

 question of sports has its psychological significance, for if the way 

 becomes dark the wanderer invokes the aid of this ignis fatuus to cut 

 short his difficulties. Sir William Thompson supposes that life may first 

 have come to earth by way of some meteor, and Brinton iDroposes that 

 man is a sport from some of the lower creation. It is certainly a strange 

 type of mind which ascribes a self-centered and self-sufiflcient power to 

 the tree of life, and then, at the very critical i^oints, adopts a wholly 

 extraneous force and one which is plainly but a survival of the old cat- 

 aclysmic type of mind; and it is the stranger, too, because such type of 

 explanation is not suggested by observation or experiment, but simply 

 by what is for the time an insuperable barrier of ignorance of natural 

 processes. If evolution is true at all, there is reason to suppose that it 

 extends from beginning to finish of creation, and the stopping of the 

 process at obscure intervals is only a temporary satisfaction to a mind 

 that is not yet fully committed to the eternal truth of ascent. The tree 

 of life has no doubt grown steadily and gradually, and the same lorces, 

 variously modified by the changing physical conditions of the earth, 

 have run on with slow but mighty energy until the present time. Any 

 radical change in the plan would have defeated it, and any mere acci- 

 dental circumstance is too trivial to be considered as a modifying influ- 

 ence of the great onward movement of creation, particularly when it 

 assumes to account for the appearing of the very capstone of the whole 

 mighty structure. 



Bear with me if I recite a few specific examples of the survival of the 

 unlike, or of the importance, to organic types, of gradually widening 

 differences. Illustrations might be drawn from every field of the 

 organic creation, but I choose a few from plants because these are the 

 most neglected and I am most familiar with them. These are given to 



