been derived by means of the fundamental facts of variability and reproduction from some allied plant or animal. It is interesting here to note, that the two _essential factors_ of the process of constant adaptation to the environment by great variability and rapid multiplication, formed no part of Lamarck's theory, which some people still think to be as good as Darwin's. Equally suggestive is the fact that, while extensive groups of life-phenomena, such as colour, weapons, hair, scales, and feathers, can hardly be conceived as having been produced or modified by _effort_ or by the direct action of the environment, they are yet, every one of them, perfectly explained by the fundamental and necessary processes of variability and survival, acting slowly and continuously, but with intermittent periods of extreme activity at long intervals, on all living things. One of the weakest and most foolish of all the objections to the Darwinian theory is, that it does not explain _variation_, and is therefore worthless. We might as well say that Newton's discovery of the laws of gravitation was worthless because its _cause_ was not and has not yet been discovered; or that the undulatory theory of light and heat is worthless, because the origin of the ether, the thing that _undulates_, is not known. The _beginnings_ of things can never be known; and, as Darwin well said, it is foolish to waste time in speculation about them. I think I have shown in my _World of Life_ that infinite variability is a basic law of Nature, and have suggested its probable purpose. That purpose seems to have been the development of a life-world culminating in Man—a being capable of studying, and enjoying, and to some extent comprehending, the vast universe around him, from the microscopic life in almost every drop of water to the whirling nebulæ of the glittering star-depths extending to almost unimaginable distances around him. Looking at him thus, man is as much above, and as different from, the beasts that perish as they are above and beyond the inanimate masses of meteoritic matter which, as we now know, occupy the apparently vacant spaces of our solar system, and from which comets and stars are in all probability the aggregations due to the action of the various cosmic forces which everywhere seem capable of producing variety and order out of a more uniform but less orderly chaos.