would tend to make organisms unworkable by the excessive differences in its rate and manner of action on co-operative parts, and by adapting these parts to the total amount of nourishment received rather than to occasional necessity or actual usefulness. It would tend to stereotype habits and convert reason into instinct. How then can we rely upon use-inheritance for the improvement of the race? Even if it is not a sheer delusion, it may be more detrimental as a positive evil than it is advantageous as an unnecessary benefit; and as a normal modifying agent it is miserably weak and untrustworthy in comparison with the powerful selective influences by which nature and society continually and inevitably affect the species for good or for evil. The effects of use and disuse--rightly directed by education in its widest sense--must of course be called in to secure the highly essential but nevertheless _superficial, limited, and partly deceptive_ improvement of individuals and of social manners and methods; but as this artificial development of already existing potentialities does not directly or readily tend to become congenital, it is evident that some considerable amount of natural or artificial selection of the more favourably varying individuals will still be the only means of securing the race against the constant tendency to degeneration which would ultimately swallow up all the advantages of civilization. The selective influences by which our present high level has been reached and maintained may well be modified, but they must not be abandoned or reversed in the rash expectation that State education, or State feeding of children, or State housing of the poor, or any amount of State socialism or public or private philanthropy, will prove permanently satisfactory substitutes. If ruinous deterioration and other more immediate evils, are to be avoided, the race must still be to the swift and the battle to the strong. The healthy Individualism so earnestly championed by Mr. Spencer must be allowed free play. Open competition, as Darwin teaches, with its survival and multiplication of the fittest, must be allowed to decide the battle of life independently of a foolish benevolence that prefers the elaborate cultivation and multiplication of weeds to the growth of corn and roses. We are trustees for the countless generations of the future. If we are wise we shall trust to the great ruling truths that we assuredly know, rather than to the seductive claims of an alleged factor of evolution for which no satisfactory evidence can be produced. THE END. RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BUNGAY. FOOTNOTES: [72] Professor Romanes had casts made of the feet of upland geese, and could not detect any diminution as compared with the web of other geese in relation to the toes. NATURE SERIES.