LIFE THE TRAVELER 
doublings are, in a measure, accidental. But it ends 
as it began, a stream of water and only that. But 
the stream of life begins in definite forms, and, as it 
flows on, changes perpetually and increasingly into 
higher and more complex forms. Its physics and 
chemistry are the same as that of the stream of non- 
living bodies, its elements are the same, but changes 
and transformations take place of which non-living 
forms know nothing. Of course the fortuitous plays 
a part in the course of the living as in that of the 
non-living, but it plays an entirely secondary part. 
The seeds that fall upon rocky or barren places do 
not sprout, and they fall where the chance winds or 
floods drop them. 
We may never be able to make a logical statement 
about this something here hinted at, but that there 
is no controlling purpose in organic nature, that the 
eye, the heart, the brain of man, are mere molecular 
accidents, like a profile in the rocks, or a face in the 
clouds, is unthinkable. Natural selection does not 
work on dead things, and it does not beget life, and 
in the origin of species it can play only a secondary 
part. As has been said, it may, in a measure, ac- 
count for the survival of the fittest, but not for the 
arrival of the fittest. 
Natural selection is only a name for a weeding-out 
or eliminating process, and were it not for the inher- 
ent tendency to development which organisms pos- 
sess, coupled with the variations that result from 
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