Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/236

224 shall survive and supplant the parent, or whether the parent form shall survive and supplant the variations, is a matter which depends entirely on those conditions which give rise to the struggle for existence. If the surrounding conditions are such that the parent form is more competent to deal with them and flourish in them than the derived forms, then in the struggle for existence the parent form will maintain itself, and the derived forms will be exterminated. But, if, on the contrary, the conditions are such as to be more favorable to a derived than to the parent form, the parent form will be extirpated, and the derived form will take its place. In the first case, there will be no progression, no change of structure, through any imaginable series of ages; in the second place, there will be modification and change of form." To the same end Darwin himself leads us. In one or two very pregnant passages, the author of the "Theory of Natural Selection" very plainly indicates why progression should not be universal, and why certain beings remain lowly organized while others attain to the summit and pinnacle of their respective organizations. "How is it," says Darwin, "that throughout the world a multitude of the lowest forms still exist? and how is it that in each great class some forms are far more highly developed than others? Why have not the more highly developed forms everywhere supplanted and exterminated the lower?" Answering his own queries, Darwin says that natural selection by no



means includes "progressive development—it only takes advantage," he remarks, "of such variations as arise and are beneficial to each creature under its complex relations of life. And it may be asked, what advantage, as far as we can see, would it be to an infusorian animalcule—to an intestinal worm—or even to an earthworm, to be highly organized? If it were no advantage, these forms would be