on steadily gaining ground, adding field to field and farm to farm,
and becoming year by year more capable and prosperous. Given time--
of which there is no scant in the matter of organic development--and
cunning will do more with ill luck than folly with good. People do
not hold six trumps every hand for a dozen games of whist running,
if they do not keep a card or two up their sleeves. Cunning, if it
can keep its head above water at all, will beat mere luck unaided by
cunning, no matter what start luck may have had, if the race be a
fairly long one. Growth is a kind of success which does indeed come
to some organisms with less effort than to others, but it cannot be
maintained and improved upon without pains and effort. A foolish
organism and its fortuitous variation will be soon parted, for, as a
general rule, unless the variation has so much connection with the
organism's past habits and ways of thought as to be in no proper
sense of the word "fortuitous," the organism will not know what to
do with it when it has got it, no matter how favourable it may be,
and it is little likely to be handed down to descendants. Indeed
the kind of people who get on best in the world--and what test to a
Darwinian can be comparable to this?--commonly do insist on cunning
rather than on luck, sometimes perhaps even unduly; speaking, at
least, from experience, I have generally found myself more or less
of a failure with those Darwinians to whom I have endeavoured to
excuse my shortcomings on the score of luck.

It may be said that the contention that the nature of the organism
does more towards determining its future than the conditions of its
immediate environment do, is only another way of saying that the
accidents which have happened to an organism in the persons of its
ancestors throughout all time are more irresistible by it for good
or ill than any of the more ordinary chances and changes of its own