Evolution & ethics and other essays / by Thomas H. Huxley.

  • Huxley Thomas Henry, 1825-1895.
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Evolution & ethics and other essays / by Thomas H. Huxley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    I tion as the means whereby hundreds compete for the place and nourishment adequate for one; it employs frost and drought to cut off the weak and unfortunate; to survive, there is need not only of strength, but of flexibility and of good fortune. The gardener, on the other hand, restricts multi]3lication; provides that each plant shall have sufficient space and nourishment; protects from frost and drought; and, in every other way, attempts to modify the conditions, in such a manner as to bring about the survival of those forms which most nearly approach the standard of the useful, or the beautiful, which he has in his mind. If the fruits and the tubers, the foliage and the flowers thus obtained, reach, or sufficiently approach, that ideal, there is no reason why the stahis quo attained should not be indefinitely pro- longed. So long as the state of nature remains approximately the same, so long will the energy and intelligence which created the garden suffice to maintain it. However, the limits within which this mastery of man over nature can be maintained are narrow. If the conditions of the cretaceous epoch returned, I fear the most skilful of gardeners would have to give up the cultivation of apples and gooseberries ; while, if those of the glacial period once again obtained, open asparagus beds would be superfluous, and the training of fruit trees