224 DARWIN AND PALEONTOLOGY 



wondered if any one could ever give an explana- 

 tion of the origin of fitness in a blade of grass; 

 that fitness had become the teleological citadel of 

 the supernaturalists. Darwin was believed by 

 many, but not by all, to have solved this problem 

 of the ages. Let me quote the very recent lan- 

 guage of our most profound American philo- 

 sophical thinker, William James ^ : — 



" It is strange, considering how unanimously our 

 ancestors felt the force of this argument [that is, the 

 teleological], to see how little it counts for since the 

 triumph of the Darwinian theory. Darwin opened our 

 minds to the power of chance-happenings to bring forth 

 ' fit ' results, if only they have time to add themselves 

 together. He showed the enormous waste of nature in 

 producing results that get destroyed because of their 

 unfitness." 



I repeat: paleontology is not silent, but pre- 

 sents a solid array of evidence against what was 

 never more than an ingenious working hypoth- 

 esis of DatAvin ; one he fathered and loved, it is 

 true, but which met little favor in the sturdy and 

 logical mind of Huxley, predisposed as he was 

 to Darwinism. It is now no longer a question 



1 James, William: Pragmatism. Svoj Longmans, Green & 

 Co., New York, 1907, pp. 110, 111. Professor William Bateson 

 gives a similar definition. "Darwin's Solution. Darwin, without 

 suggesting causes of Variation, points out that since (1) Varia- 

 tions occur — ^which they are known to do — and since (2) some 

 of the Variations are in the direction of adaptation and others 

 are not — which is a necessity — it will result from the conditions 

 of the Struggle for Existence that those better adapted will on 

 the whole persist and the less adapted will on the whole be lost." 

 Materials for the Study of Variation, Treated with Especial 

 Regard to DiscontinuAty in the Origin of Species, 8vo, London, 

 1894, p. 5. 



