Page:The Last link.djvu/138

126 making for green localities: if he did not he would be eaten up sooner than his more circumspect comrades. But this making for, and sitting in, the green has not necessarily made him of that colour. Extreme advocates of one view would argue as follows: Once upon a time there were among the offspring of ancestral tree-frogs some which, among other colours, exhibited green, not much, perhaps not even perceptible to our eyes. The occurrence of this colour, according to them, was spontaneous, a freak—as if in reality there were anything spontaneous in the sense of being causeless. The descendants of these more greenish creatures, provided they did not pair with frogs of the ordinary set, became still greener (by accumulative inheritance), and so on, until the green was pronounced sufficient to be of advantage when competition could set in.

With this view there is always the difficulty of understanding how the initial very small changes can be useful, unless we have