The theory of Natural Selection is a jealous god and it will admit no rival, nor even any support. You must make it your mainstay or give it up: for the whole point of it is that it permits you, if you will, to eliminate Will and Mind from the Universe. The moment you have to prop it up with some theory involving Will and Mind the essence of it disappears. Therefore does Weissmann, the most famous of its later defenders, ascribe to it “All-might” (to make a barbaric translation of his term) and desperately add that we “must” accept Natural Selection because the only alternative is design—that is God; the Inadmissible: the Dogmatically Denied. Suppose a man to say, “No one threw that stone: it hit my window by the force of gravity.” Another then points out that a stone, merely falling, would have gone past the window, and that the stone, from the course it took, striking the window, must have been thrown by someone to take the glass at the angle it did. To this the man replies: “Well, yes, perhaps; but gravity influenced its course.” Clearly he has abandoned his case. He was arguing that the stone merely fell: that no Will or Design caused it to take the path it did. When he admits a thrower of the stone and merely brings in gravity as affecting the course of the stone he abandons his position altogether. That is exactly parallel to the old-fashioned advocate of Natural Selection who reluctantly admits, on modern evidence—and mainly through the work of De Vries—great and rapid changes adapting animals to a new environment, but adds, “Anyhow, those that _don’t_ change will be killed off.” Of course they will! But that isn’t the point. The point is that the killing off of the unfit is proved _not_ to be the _agent_ of change. The climate gets colder. Much thicker fleeces begin to appear. Such animals as don’t show the new thick fleeces begin to die out. Obviously!—But that doesn’t explain why the thicker fleeces began to appear. If you admit Mutation (the name for rapid change) or Saltatory Evolution (Evolution by jumps) poor old Natural Selection goes by the board. In the same way Natural Selection does not mean that, upon a change of environment, things unsuitable to the new condition tend to disappear. Of course they do. If there is a flood, fishes survive, cattle are drowned. The fishes are fitter to survive the flood than the cattle. And if the flood lasted long enough, there would at the end of it be plenty of fish and no cattle. But to talk of that as “Natural Selection” is to use the same word in two different senses. The theory of Natural Selection as the _agent_ of Evolution does not mean that floods drown cattle and don’t drown fish. We all know that. The theory means that successive floods turn cattle into fish—and that is a very different proposition!