LIFE THE TRAVELER 
in a profound calm. Life is a struggle always. Only 
living things struggle; in the organic world alone 
is there an activity that is an effort. There is ac- 
tivity in all matter, visible and invisible activity, 
the end of which is to reach an equilibrium. 
The key-word of evolution is organic effort, the 
inherent impetus of life. No conjuring with merely 
mechanical forces can, in my opinion, account for 
the upward or aspiring tendency of organic nature. 
Life struggled out of the fish into the reptile, and 
out of the reptile into the bird, but left these forms 
still flourishing behind it. According to natural 
selection these unfit forms ought all to have gone 
out. The fish is as fit to survive as the reptile, and 
the reptile as fit as the bird and the mammal, and 
the mammal as fit as man; the invertebrate as fit 
as the vertebrate. The individuals of these species 
that do not survive are cut off by accident largely, 
then by reason of low vitality, or a scant measure 
of life. The competition with other living forms 
plays only a secondary part. I fancy that all the 
animals of any and every kind that are well born, 
that is, with a normal life-endowment, thrive 
equally well and survive equally well, except so far 
as accident enters into the problem. If food is 
scarce, they go hungry together, until those en- 
feebled by age and other things are eliminated. 
The variations which lead up to the formation 
of a new species are so insensible, they stretch over 
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