The fact of human variation requires no elucidation; it is as real for men as for insects and trees. Indeed, some of the most significant facts of variation have been first made out in the case of the human species. The struggle for existence can be seen in everyday life. We cannot doubt its reality when scores perish annually because of their failure to withstand the extreme degrees of temperature during midwinter and midsummer; when starvation causes so many deaths, and when the incessant combat with bacterial enemies alone brings the list of casualties on the human side in our own country to more than two hundred and fifty thousand a year. As in nature at large, the more unfit are eliminated as a result of this struggle, while the more adapted succeed. In the long run, that particular applicant for a clerkship or any other work who may be the more fitted is the one who gets it. While the severity of competition may be somewhat mitigated as the result of social organization, and while our altruistic charitable institutions enable many to prolong a more or less efficient existence, the struggle for existence cannot be entirely done away with. Heredity also is a real human process, and it follows the same course as in animals at large; as in the case of variation, some of the fundamental laws of its operation have been first worked out in the case of human phenomena, and have been found subsequently to be of general application. Reverting to the specific question as to the earliest divergence of man from the apes, we can readily see how the superior development of the ape-man's brain gave him a great advantage over his nearest competitors, and how truly human ingenuity enabled the earliest men to employ weapons and crude instruments instead of brute force. Thus the gap between men and apes widened more and more, as reasoning power increased through successive generations. This is another aspect of the statement that the supreme position of man has been gained, not by superior organization in physical respects outside of the nervous system, but by the superior control of human organization by the higher organs of this system. The unity of nature and of its processes is established more and more surely as the naturalist classifies the facts of structure, development, fossil history, and evolutionary method. Our own species is not unique; it takes its high place among other organic forms whose lives are controlled in every way by the uniform consistent laws of the world. * * * * *