UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 
environmental influences, natural selection would 
have nothing to go upon. It is the conflict between 
the push of life and the obstacles which it encounters 
that results in the survival of the fittest. The prime 
factor in the origin of species is this aboriginal push 
or organizing tendency, the modifying factor is the 
stress of the environment. Are we not compelled 
to look upon organic nature as a whole, and to say 
that it knows from the first what it wants, and the 
means to obtain it? Could any struggle for life of 
the lower organisms have resulted in the higher 
forms had not these forms been in some way predi- 
cated in the lower? The German biologist and phi- 
losopher makes this struggle creative. It does not 
merely bring out inherent capabilities, it begets 
those capabilities de novo. Natural selection is all- 
potent. “No leaves or flowers,” he says, “no diges- 
tion or system, no lungs, legs, wings, bones, or 
muscles were present in the primitive forms, and all 
these must have arisen from them according to the 
principle of natural selection.” Natural selection 
invented and perfected the wonderful piece of mech- 
anism we know as the human body. The kidneys, 
the liver, the lungs, the heart, the brain, the eye, the 
hand, the double circulation, — all the result of 
chance, or the hit-and-miss method of the blind, 
irrational physical and chemical forces! 
Why these forces left some forms so low down in 
the animal scale, and carried others so much higher 
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