This is the same confused and confusing utterance which Mr. Spencer
has been giving us any time this thirty years. According to him the
fact that variations can be inherited and accumulated has less to do
with the first development of organic life, than the fact that if a
square organism happens to get into a square hole, it will live
longer and more happily than a square organism which happens to get
into a round one; he declares "the survival of the fittest"--and
this is nothing but the fact that those who "fit" best into their
surroundings will live longest and most comfortably--to have more to
do with the development of the amoeba into, we will say, a mollusc
than heredity itself. True, "inheritance of functionally produced
modifications" is allowed to be the chief factor throughout the
"higher stages of organic evolution," but it has very little to do
in the lower; in these "the almost exclusive factor" is not
heredity, or inheritance, but "survival of the fittest."

Of course we know that Mr. Spencer does not believe this; of course,
also, all who are fairly well up in the history of the development
theory will see why Mr. Spencer has attempted to draw this
distinction between the "factors" of the development of the higher
and lower forms of life; but no matter how or why Mr. Spencer has
been led to say what he has, he has no business to have said it.
What can we think of a writer who, after so many years of writing
upon his subject, in a passage in which he should make his meaning
doubly clear, inasmuch as he is claiming ground taken by other
writers, declares that though hereditary use and disuse, or, to use
his own words, "the inheritance of functionally produced
modifications," is indeed very important in connection with the
development of the higher forms of life, yet heredity itself has
little or nothing to do with that of the lower? Variations, whether