INDIVIDUAL rERFECTION IS RACE TEREECTION 241 



President Butler, speaking before the Constitutional Convention of tins 

 State, "is the cornerstone of the free State." That is the decree which 

 is written in burning letters on every mile-post of the course of life. 

 "The perfection of the individual is the perfection of the race," says Pro- 

 fessor Hoffman. "But," he adds, writing on the organization of the 

 State, "the individual can have no rights or duties that conflict with the 

 good of the whole" — a supplement for whicli it is exceedingly doubtful 

 that any substantiation can be found in nature. 



a It has been my environmental control to study and, I hope, to learn 

 some of the lessons of life from their simplest and most easily legible 

 expressions — a result that has come from living and laboring in a State 

 built from the early waters with their undifferentiated expressions of life. 

 The panorama of successive early worlds of life glows with the simple 

 expressions of law which become more involved, supplemented and be- 

 clouded as the passing of the ages complicates the process of higher evo- 

 lution, and produces expressions which, in terms of existing life alone, 

 would be difficultly intelligible. The study of the meaning of existing 

 life without the light of its vast history leads nowhere. 



It is safe to say, I think, that living beings at the start, animated na- 

 ture, whatever its composition, had an equal chance for progress and 

 improvement. How soon that chance became forfeit we can not say, but 

 it is obvious that life was not long begun and its greater stocks established 

 when their courses throughout existence were set and determined. Noth- 

 ing is more obvious in chronology than nature's deliberate failures, noth- 

 ing more clear in paleontology than her set purposes. 



The vast subkingdom of the Mollusca started well with bodily inde- 

 pendence, fully equipped with locomotive powers, an excellent innerva- 

 tion, but they sold their birthright for ease and content. They soon be- 

 came dependent on the movements of the waters and waited for the waves 

 to l3ring them food. Compact in their protection and adaptation, these 

 types of life have. come crowding down through the ages in inexpressible 

 variety. They and their allied phyla in the great subkingdom to which 

 they belong have, it would seem, struggled now and again to regain their 

 primitive independence and maintain it; but the early condemnation of 

 the law has overawed them, and out of them all has come and can come 

 nothing better. They had their chance. That chance was missed; for 

 untold millions of years they have failed to improve. They still cumber 

 the earth to teach the lesson of an incurable heritage. You who are 

 students of ancient life know how great is the multitude of lessons like 

 this. 



