Darwin inoculated biological science with this Epicurean metaphysics, when, in his “Origin of Species,” he ascribed discriminating and selective powers of great delicacy and precision to the blind factors of a heterogeneous and variable environment. He compared natural selection to artificial selection, and in so doing, he was led astray by a false implication of his own analogy—“I have called this principle,” he says, “by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term natural selection, in order to mark its relation to man’s power of selection.” (“Origin of Species,” 6th ed., c. III, p. 58.) Having likened the unintelligent and fortuitous selection and elimination exercised by the environment to the intelligent and purposive selection and elimination practiced by animal breeders and horticulturists, he pressed the analogy to the unwarranted extent of attributing to a blind, lifeless, and impersonal aggregate of minerals, liquids, and gases superhuman powers of discretion. To preserve even the semblance of parity, he ought first to have expurgated the process of artificial selection by getting rid of the element of human intelligence, which lurks therein, and vitiates its parallelism with the unconscious and purposeless havoc wrought at random by the blind and uncoördinated agencies of the environment. If inorganic nature were a vast and multifarious mold, a preformed sieve with holes of different sizes, a separator for sorting coins of various denominations, Darwin’s idea would be, in some degree, defensible, but this would only transfer the problem of cosmic order and intelligence from the organism to the environment. As a matter of fact, the mechanism of the environment is far too _simple_ in its structure and too _general_ in its influence to account for the complexities and specificities of organisms, that is, for the morphology and specific differences of plants and animals. Hence the selective work of the environment is negligible in the positive sense, and consists, for the most part, in a tendency to eliminate the abnormal and the subnormal. On the other hand, the environment as well as the organism is fundamentally teleological, and the environmental mechanism, though simple and general, is nevertheless expressly preadapted for the maintenance of organic life. Henderson, the bio-chemist of Harvard, has shown conclusively, in his “Fitness of the Environment” (1913), that the environment itself has been expressly selected with this finality in view, and that the inorganic world, while not the active cause, is, nevertheless, the preördained complement of organic life.