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 life 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 
~ 
Q7 
