Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/159

Rh individual differences are so overshadowed by the much more conspicuous resemblances due to heredity—with which they compare about as the green buds at the tips of the twigs of a large tree compare with the hard wood of the trunk and branches, the growth of previous years—and they are so fluctuating and inconstant, that their importance may easily escape attention. Careful observation shows, however, that every characteristic may vary: those distinctive of the class or order as well as those which mark the species or variety. The variations may manifest themselves in the adult, or at any other period in the life of the individual. Even the eggs have individualities of their own, and among many groups of animals the eggs of the same parent, when placed under precisely similar conditions, may differ in the rate and manner of development. Although most of these individual differences are transient, and disappear within a few generations, there can now be no doubt that those which tend to bring the organism into more perfect harmony with its environment, and are therefore advantageous, may be established as hereditary features, through the action of the law of the survival of the fittest; and it is hardly possible to over-estimate the value of the evidence which paleontology and embryology now furnish to prove that all hereditary characteristics, even the most fundamental, were originally individual variations.

The series of hereditary structures and functions which makes up the life of an organism is constantly being extended by the addition of new features, which at first were individual variations, and are gradually built into the hereditary life history. In this way newly acquired peculiarities are gradually pushed further and further from what may be called the growing end of the series, by the addition of newer variations above them. It can also be shown that from time to time the peculiarities at the other end of the series, the oldest hereditary features, are crowded out of the life of the organism, and dropped, so that an animal which is high in the scale of evolution does not repeat, in its own development, all of the early steps through which its most remote ancestors have passed. The series of hereditary characteristics, thus growing at one end and fading away at the other, gradually raises the organism to new and higher stages of specialization, and its evolution by variation and heredity may be compared with the growth of a glacier.

The slight individual differences are represented by the new layers of snow added by the storms to the deposit which fills the valley in which the glacier arises. The snows which are soon blown away are those variations which, being of no use, soon disappear; while the snow which remains in the valley, and is gradually converted into ice, represents those individual differences which are seized upon by natural selection, and gradually rendered hereditary and constant. The long stream of ice stretching down to lower regions, and made up of the