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SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST.

The doctrine of the "survival of the fittest" must be strangely understood in some quarters. The American papers report Prof. Agassiz as having expressed himself in this wise at a recent meeting of the Massachusetts State Board of Agriculture, of which he is a member:—"I do not know how animals originated; a brilliant imagination that of Darwin; a very necessary faculty in the scientist. The sense I know too well to misquote him. Hasty generalising of observation is Darwin all over. Natural selection is out of generation. Natural necessity, what is it? Do we find that only the strong beget families? Observe plants at the foot of the White mountains, where are large trees, and so up to the summit, where they are mere shrubs. The weak may and do survive as well as the strong. Ignorance lies at the base of the discussion."

Probably no one naturalist, however eminent, can be expected to know everything, or even all simple things. Can it be possible that Prof. Agassiz supposes (as his argument seems to require) that the dwarf trees in question grow and survive near the top of the mountain, notwithstanding they are not the fittest, rather than because they are the fittest, for the conditions? And does he conceive the doctrine of natural selection to be founded upon some idea of an abstract fitness, irrespective of the conditions, and not upon the survival of the fittest under and in consequence of the conditions? Surely the argument brought against the doctrine is a good illustration in its favour, only an extremely simple and elementary one.

We never could quite comprehend why Prof. Agassiz should give himself so heartily and persistently to the work of demolishing the doctrine of the derivation of species, in all its forms, considering how large and honourable a part he has himself taken in laying the foundation upon which the modern doctrine has been built. Of these foundations none is stronger than the capital one, generally supposed to be established by him, that the succession of species in time corresponds mainly with that in systematic rank, and is also somehow paralleled in the development of each individual of the higher ranks. So that, in view of his continued but unsuccessful efforts to drive the incoming doctrine out of the land, we could imagine him addressing his own important discoveries in the words used by Balak to Balaam:— "What hast thou done unto me? I took thee to curse mine enemies, and behold, thou hast blessed them altogether."