THE WONDER OF LIFE 639 



selection, for it does not simply submit to the apparently- 

 inevitable. It often evades its fate by a change of policy 

 or of environment ; it compromises, it experiments ; it 

 is fuU of device and endeavom:. It is certainly much more 

 than a pawn in the hands of Fate or Environment ; it 

 plays its own game. Besides the variabiKty or inventive- 

 ness, which, from the germ-ceUs outwards, offers solutions 

 to hfe's problems, there is the organism's utilisation of these 

 assets, and there is the equally fimdamental entailment or 

 hereditary registration of the successful new departures 

 without which evolution were impossible. 



The Continuity of Evolution. — Immense gaps in our 

 knowledge are immediately apparent when we inquire 

 into the origin of hving organisms upon the earth, the 

 beginnings of intelhgent behaviour, the origin of Verte- 

 brates, the emergence of Man, and so on. We know very 

 Httle as yet in regard to the way in which any of the ' big 

 lifts ' in evolution have come about, and yet we beheve 

 in the continuity of the process. That is imphed in our 

 ideal concept of evolution, which we accept as a working 

 hjrpothesis. It is not very easy to say what it is that is 

 continuous, but we mean in part that there is at no stage 

 any intrusion of extraneous factors. But this continues 

 to raise in the minds of many the difficulty that the results 

 seem much too large for their antecedents. Can we beheve 

 that the world of hfe, with its cUmax in Man, has been 

 evolved from a nebulous mass ? 



f Let us recall Huxley's famous statement of his radical 

 mechanism : — 



' If the fundamental proposition of evolution is true, 

 namely, that the entire world, animate and inanimate, is 

 the result of the mutual interaction, according to definite 



