The Power That Preserves | My Web Site Page 039 Chapter 02 Page 01

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The night passed on, and though the king's mind was relieved, he suffered much bodily agony. In the morning, when he perceived that it was light, he asked the attendants to open the curtains, that he might see the sun for the last time. It gave him but a momentary pleasure, for he was restless and in great suffering. Some pains which he endured increased so much that it was decided to bleed him. The operation relieved the suffering, but exhausted the sufferer's strength so that he soon lost the power of speech, and lay afterward helpless and almost insensible, longing for the relief which now nothing but death could bring him. This continued till about noon, when he ceased to breathe.

Perhaps he married somebody's daughter. If a man would get hold of the public ear, he must pay, marry, or fight. I have never understood that AEschylus was a man of means, and the fighters do not write poetry, so I suppose he must have married a theatrical manager's daughter, and got his plays brought out that way. The ear of any age or country is like its land, air, and water; it seems limitless but is really limited, and is already in the keeping of those who naturally enough will have no squatting on such valuable property. It is written and talked up to as closely as the means of subsistence are bred up to by a teeming population. There is not a square inch of it but is in private hands, and he who would freehold any part of it must do so by purchase, marriage, or fighting, in the usual way--and fighting gives the longest, safest tenure. The public itself has hardly more voice in the question who shall have its ear, than the land has in choosing its owners. It is farmed as those who own it think most profitable to themselves, and small blame to them; nevertheless, it has a residuum of mulishness which the land has not, and does sometimes dispossess its tenants. It is in this residuum that those who fight place their hope and trust.

The fact of coadaptation, which was supposed to furnish the strongest argument against the principle of selection, in reality yields the clearest evidence in favour of it. We _must_ assume it, _because no other possibility of explanation is open to us, and because these adaptations actually exist, that is to say, have really taken place_. With this conviction I attempted, as far back as 1894, when the idea of germinal selection had not yet occurred to me, to make "harmonious adaptation" (coadaptation) more easily intelligible in some way or other, and so I was led to the idea, which was subsequently expounded in detail by Baldwin, and Lloyd Morgan, and also by Osborn, and Gulick as _Organic Selection_. It seemed to me that it was not necessary that all the germinal variations required for secondary variations should have occurred _simultaneously_, since, for instance, in the case of the stag, the bones, muscles, sinews, and nerves would be incited by the increasing heaviness of the antlers to greater activity in _the individual life_, and so would be strengthened. The antlers can only have increased in size by very slow degrees, so that the muscles and bones may have been able to keep pace with their growth in the individual life, until the requisite germinal variations presented themselves. In this way a disharmony between the increasing weight of the antlers and the parts which support and move them would be avoided, since time would be given for the appropriate germinal variations to occur, and so to set agoing the _hereditary_ variation of the muscles, sinews and bones.[42]

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