UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 
foreshadows these things? Or in organized matter 
itself? Could we infer the bird from the reptile? or 
man from the unreasoning brute? 
Even if we accept Weismann’s conception of 
natural selection as like unto a man on a journey in 
a pathless wilderness, do we not still want some ex- 
planation of why he has undertaken the journey and 
what his ultimate goal may be? A man lost in the 
woods or in the desert wanders blindly 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 impulse? 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 blind groping. Then Weis- 
mann’s traveler starts on his journey as one of the 
very low forms of life, and by sheer luck, and by 
blindly running the gantlet of all 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 mountain- 
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 
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