UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 



foreshadows these things? Or in organized matter 

 itself? Could we infer the bird from the reptile? or 

 man from the mireasoning brute? 



Even if we accept Weismann's conception of 

 natural selection as Uke unto a man on a journey in 

 a pathless wilderness, do we not still want some ex- 

 planation of why he has imdertaken the journey and 

 what his idtimate goal may be? A man lost in the 

 woods or in the desert wanders bUndly on in a circle 

 and gets nowhere. Could evolution ever have ar- 

 rived at man, had not man, in some way beyond our 

 power to grasp, been potential in the primal organ- 

 izing impidse? And so of all other forms? But 

 Weismann's traveler does not know where he is go- 

 ing; he goes where "the most tortuous and winding 

 route leads him." There is no intelligence in the 

 matter, there is only bUnd groping. Then Weis- 

 mann's traveler starts on his journey as one of the 

 very low forms of hfe, and by sheer luck, and by 

 bUndly running the gantlet of aU the countless 

 hazards of the long geologic ages, he ends as man. 

 Other forms on the same journey, through the law 

 of probability, end as reptiles, or birds, or butter- 

 flies, or quadrupeds. It is all a chance throw of the 

 dice. A stream of water starting on the moimtain- 

 side takes the easiest way and reaches the river or 

 the lake or the sea. It is all a matter of physics. 

 Whether it flow north or south or east or west de- 

 pends upon the lay of the land. All its loopings and 



