Against the injurious influence of artificial military and medical selection, we fortunately have a salutary counterpoise, in the invincible and much more powerful influence of _natural selection_, which prevails everywhere. For in the life of man, as well as in that of animals and plants, this influence is the most important transforming principle, and the strongest lever for progress and amelioration. The result of the struggle for life is that, in the long run, that which is better, because more perfect, conquers that which is weaker and imperfect. In human life, however, this struggle for life will ever become more and more of an intellectual struggle, not a struggle with weapons of murder. The organ which, above all others, in man becomes more perfect by the ennobling influence of natural selection, is the _brain_. The man with the most perfect understanding, not the man with the best revolver, will in the long run be victorious; he will transmit to his descendants the qualities of the brain which assisted him in the victory. Thus then we may justly hope, in spite of all the efforts of retrograde forces, that the progress of mankind towards freedom, and thus to the utmost perfection, will, by the happy influence of natural selection, become more and more certain. CHAPTER VIII. TRANSMISSION BY INHERITANCE AND PROPAGATION. Universality of Inheritance and Transmission by Inheritance.—Special Evidences of the same.—Human Beings with four, six, or seven Fingers and Toes.—Porcupine Men.—Transmission of Diseases, especially Diseases of the Mind.—Original Sin.—Hereditary Monarchies.—Hereditary Aristocracy.—Hereditary Talents and Mental Qualities.—Material Causes of Transmission by Inheritance.—Connection between Transmission by Inheritance and Propagation.—Spontaneous Generation and Propagation.—Non-sexual or Monogonous Propagation.—Propagation by Self-Division.—Monera and Amœbæ.—Propagation by the formation of Buds, by the formation of Germ-Buds, by the formation of Germ-Cells.—Sexual or Amphigonous Propagation.—Formation of Hermaphrodites.—Distinction of Sexes, or Gonochorism.—Virginal Breeding, or Parthenogenesis.—Material Transmission of Peculiarities of both Parents to the Child by Sexual Propagation.—Difference between Transmission by Inheritance in Sexual and in Asexual Propagation.