From Professor Shaler's "Nature and Man in America" I get an impression which again deepens my feeling of something half human about our lucky planet, at least something progressive and unequal, like life itself. Shaler finds that organic development in the Northern Hemisphere is more advanced, by a whole geologic period, than in the Southern, with Europe at the head and Australia the greatest laggard. The animal life of Australia is much like that of Europe in the Jurassic period, while both Asia and Africa possess forms, such as elephants, and tigers, and lions, which abounded in Europe in Tertiary times. Hence the Northern Hemisphere is more like the head of the beast, and the Southern more like the viscera. The Northern races easily dominate the Southern. The flowering of civilization is in the North. It is very certain that man originated north of the equator. I think that one need not expect that the achievements of man in Australia, or in South America, will rival the achievements of man nearer the magnetic pole of the earth. VII. DARWINISM AND THE WAR That Darwinism was indirectly one of the causes of the World War seems to me quite obvious. Unwittingly the great and gentle naturalist has more to answer for than he ever dreamed of. His biological doctrine of the struggle for existence, natural selection, and the survival of the fittest, fairly intoxicated the Germans from the first. These theories fell in well with their militarism and their natural cruelty and greediness. Their philosophers took them up eagerly. Weissmann fairly made a god of natural selection, as did other German thinkers. And when they were ready for war, the Germans at once applied the law of the jungle to human affairs. The great law of evolution, the triumph of the strong, the supremacy of the fit, became the foundation of their political and national ideals. They looked for no higher proof of the divinity of this law, as applied to races and nations, than the fact that the organic world had reached its present stage of development through the operation of this law. Darwin had given currency to these ideas. He had denied that there was any inherent tendency to development, affirming that we lived in a world of chance, and that power comes only to him who exerts power--half truths, all of them.