We may place _the law of universal adaptation_ at the head of the different laws of direct or actual adaptation, because it is the chief and most comprehensive among them. It may be briefly explained in the following proposition: “All organic individuals become unequal to one another in the course of their life by adaptation to different conditions of life, although the individuals of one and the same species remain mostly very much alike.” A certain inequality of organic individuals, as we have seen, was already to be assumed in virtue of the law of individual (indirect) adaptation. But, beyond this, the original inequality of individuals is afterwards increased by the fact that every individual, during its own independent life, subjects and adapts itself to its own peculiar conditions of existence. All different individuals of every species, however like they may be in their first stages of life, become in the further course of their existence less like to one another. They deviate from one another in more or less important peculiarities, and this is a natural consequence of the different conditions under which the individuals live. There are no two single individuals of any species which can complete their life under exactly the same external circumstances. The vital conditions of nutrition, of moisture, air, light; further, the vital conditions of society, the inter-relations with surrounding individuals of the same or other species, are different in every individual being; and this difference first affects the functions, and later changes the form of every individual organism. If the children of a human family show, even at the beginning, certain individual inequalities which we may consider as the consequence of individual (indirect) adaptation, they will appear still more different at a later period of life, when each child has passed through different experiences, and has adapted itself to different conditions of life. The original difference of the individual processes of development, evidently becomes greater the longer the life lasts and the more various the external conditions which influence the separate individuals. This may be demonstrated in the simplest manner in man, as well as in domestic animals and cultivated plants, in which the vital conditions may be arbitrarily modified. Two brothers, of whom one is brought up as a workman and the other as a priest, develop quite differently in body as well as in mind; in like manner, two dogs of one and the same birth, of which one is trained as a sporting dog and the other chained up as a watch dog. The same observation may also readily be made as to organic individuals in a natural state. If, for instance, one carefully compares all the trees in a fir or beech forest, which consists of trees of a single species, one finds that among all the hundreds or thousands of trees, there are not two individual trees completely agreeing in size of trunk and other parts, in the number of