UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 



choice of types, but favors the more perfect of a 

 given type as against the imperfect. The weak and 

 the strong in animal hfe alike succeed if each is 

 complete, or well equipped of its kind; the mouse 

 gets on as well as the lion, if it is a perfect mouse. 

 The weak, the unfit, fall out because of their scant 

 measure of life-force. Natural selection works to 

 harden and confirm a species, but plays no part in 

 originating it. 



If the unfit arrives, it is cut off by the stress of the 

 struggle for life, but it is unfit only so far as it is 

 malformed or feeble; the unfit in any other sense 

 never arrives. I saw a two-headed trout recently 

 in a collection of several hundred thousand finger- 

 lings. It was a year old. It was unfit to survive, 

 and in a state of nature would soon have perished, 

 but it had been isolated and carefully looked after. 

 Artificial selection had preserved it. How long it 

 can preserve it against natural selection is a ques- 

 tion. Tumbler and pouter and fan-tailed pigeons 

 are all preserved by artificial selection against the 

 working of natural selection. Nature's interest lies 

 not in such extreme forms, but in forms nearer the 

 mean — the rock dove, the wood pigeon, the band- 

 tailed pigeon, and the like. The myriad forms of 

 fish in the water, of birds and insects in the air, of 

 quadrupeds and bipeds on the land, are all equally 

 fit to survive and do survive, because each has its 

 full measure of life, and finds its place in the total 

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