THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST.--The survival of the fittest is a wonderful scheme of the preservation of the best. To illustrate, take the tiger and the deer. Once they herded together, the tiger not being, as now, noted for strength or cunning, nor the deer for caution and fleetness. The dull tiger was able to take as prey the least cautious and weakest of the deer. The fleetest deer propagated, and then only the most cunning tigers were able to procure food, and continue their kind. As their strength and cunning increased, the cautiousness and fleetness of the deer increased in this matched game of life; the two species reacting on each other until we now have the perfected deer and tiger. In both kingdoms of living beings, among all their diverse families and species, this struggle has gone on, and the result is the differentiation from abysmal protoplasmic slime the humming bird on the flower to the leviathan in the deep; the litchen on the rock to man with an intellectual comprehension of unknown breadth. We here have the chronicle of creation, and Froissart was not more garrulous with his exploits of lord and lady than the chroniclers of the changes effected in specific forms “on their way to man.” We hear all that is said, and with a feeling of disappointment, while admitting all, respond that we were promised a cause, and have been given only a method? What stands behind the “struggle for existence?” What is the infinite force of the ceaseless unrest, which throws each wave higher on the tide line, working like a blind giant, hewing out organic forms from protoplasm, and amid infinite failures approximating ever to the perfect, with constant prophecy that that perfection will be attained? The “survival of the fittest” reveals the prodigal method which preserves one of a million germs, casting the others back into the seething crucible for new trials. Can it claim anything more? The laws of nature are grooves in which causes run to effects; but why do they thus move? Calling them by other names will not satisfy. As Newton, when he gave the law of gravitation mathematical form, penetrated not a step toward its cause, so the biologist has not passed the threshold of the domain of life. A recent scientific association sat in silence after a verbose and flippant discussion on protoplasm, when asked by a member what was the difference between living and dead protoplasm? Not one could answer. Life had escaped their observation. Protoplasm dead is no longer protoplasm. The protoplasmic germ impelled by the forces of life, commences its growth, sending out its feeding vessels, and from the beginning copies the paleontological history of the earth, and more completely the biography of its direct ancestors.