group of qualities and breeding them, is not the way of nature at all.
Nature is not a breeder; she is a reckless coupler and--she slays. It
was a popular misconception of the theory of the Survival of the
Fittest, a misconception Lord Salisbury was at great pains to display
to the British Association in 1894, that the average of a species in
any respect is raised by the selective inter-breeding of the
individuals above the average. Lord Salisbury was no doubt misled, as
most people who share his mistake have been misled, by the grammatical
error of employing the Survival of the Fittest for the Survival of the
Fitter, in order to escape a scarcely ambiguous ambiguity. But the use
of the word "Survival" should have sufficed to indicate that the real
point of application of the force by which Nature modifies species and
raises the average in any quality, lies not in selective breeding, but
in the disproportionately numerous deaths of the individuals below the
average. And even the methods of the breeder of cattle, if they are to
produce a permanent alteration in the species of cattle, must consist
not only in breeding the desirable but in either killing the
undesirable, or at least--what is the quintessence, the inner reality
of death--in preventing them from breeding.

The general trend of thought in Mrs. Martin's _Humanitarian_ was
certainly more in accordance with this reading of biological science
than were Mr. Galton's proposals. There was a much greater insistence
upon the need of "elimination," upon the evil of the "Rapid
Multiplication of the Unfit," a word that, however, was never defined
and, I believe, really did not mean anything in particular in this
connection. And directly one does attempt to define it, directly one
sits down in a businesslike way to apply the method of elimination
instead of the method of selection, one is immediately confronted by
almost as complex an entanglement of difficulties in defining points to