The spe'ech delivered by Professor Flower on Saturday last as
a reply to the address of the Newcastle Trades' Council, contained an interesting defence of the naturalist, who Professor Huxley once declared was looked on by the world at large as "a dirty man poking about the seashore with a net in one hand and a bottle in the other." Yet the naturalist has produced effects upon our modes of thinking of the most momentous kind. "It is a law in nature that there should be a certain amount of individual differences or variations in the different animals and plants, and that the progress from the lower to the higher forms of animals and plants has been due to the opportunity of those individuals who are a little superior in some respects to their fellows of asserting that superiority, of continuing to live, and of propagating as an inheritance that superiority." This law is applicable to our social life.
The lesson of it is this, that there is always a certain amount of variability, that there is no such thing as equality—equality in powers of work, equality in powers of endurance, or equality in the powers of men for doing great things in the world; and that progress depends on giving full liberty to that superiority, wherever it asserts itself, —on its having full fling." If this law did not exist at all, we should be "slimy polyps" at the bottom of the sea ; or if it were only applicable to the animals, then mere flint-chipping savages. The prevalence of the universal law was clearly put, bat it was hardly necessary to remind working men of its application. All foremen, and not a few masters, are living examples of the survival of the fittest.
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