THE FACTORS OF ORGANIC EVOLUTION. 117 



determining organism, is there anything to ensure 

 either that, even if ground be lost for a season or two 

 in any one direction, it shall be recovered presently on 

 resumption by the organism of the habits that called 

 it into existence, or that it shall appear synchronously 

 in a sufficient number of individuals to ensure its not 

 being soon lost through gamogenesis. 



How is progress ever to be made if races keep re- 

 versing, Penelope-like, in one generation all that they 

 have been achieving in the preceding ? and how, on 

 Mr. Darwin's system, of which the accumulation of 

 strokes of luck is the greatly preponderating feature, 

 is a hoard ever to be got together and conserved, no 

 matter how often luck may have thrown good things 

 in an organism's way ? Luck, or absence of _ design, 

 may be sometimes almost said to throw good things in 

 our way, or at any rate we may occasipnally get more 

 through having made no. design than any design we 

 should have been likely to have formed would have 

 given us ; but luck does not hoard these good things 

 for our use and make our wills for us, nor does it keep 

 providing us with the same good gifts again and again, 

 and no matter how often we reject them. 



I had better, perhaps, give Mr. Spencer's own words 

 as quoted by himself in his article in the Nineteenth 

 Century for April 1886. He there wrote as follows, 

 quoting from § 166 of his "Principles of Biology," 

 which appeared in 1864: — 



" Where the life is comparatively simple, or where 

 surrounding circumstances render some one function 

 supremely important, the survival of the fittest" (which 



