Since Darwin called attention to the role of what he named “natural selection” in the genesis and preservation of species, and since his successors, both followers and opponents, have added to this many other kinds of selection that are continually operative, it has become increasingly evident that from one standpoint we may look on the sum of natural processes, organic and inorganic, as a vast selective system, as the result of which things are as they are, whether the results are the positions of celestial bodies or the relative places of human beings in the intellectual or social scale.  The exact constitution of the present population of New York is the result of a great number of selective acts, some regular, others more or less haphazard.  Selection is no less selection because it occurs by what we call chance—­for chance is only our name for the totality of trivial and unconsidered causes.  When, however, we count man and man’s efforts in the sum of natural objects and forces, we have to reckon with his intelligence in these selective processes.  I desire to call attention to the place that they play in educative systems and in particular to the way in which they may be furthered or made more effective by books, especially by public collections of books.

When we think of any kind of training as it affects the individual, we most naturally regard it as changing that individual, as making him more fit, either for life in general or for some special form of life’s activities.  But when we think of it as affecting a whole community or a whole nation, we may regard it as essentially a selective process.  In a given community it is not only desirable that a certain number of men should be trained to do a specified kind of work, but it is even more desirable that these should be the men that are best fitted to do this work.  When Mr. Luther Burbank brings into play the selection by means of which he achieves his remarkable results in plant breeding he gets rid of the unfit by destruction, and as all are unfit for the moment that do not advance the special end that he has in view, he burns up plants—­new and interesting varieties perhaps—­by the hundred thousand.  We cannot destroy the unfit, nor do we desire to do so, for from the educational point of view unfitness is merely bad adjustment.  There is a place for every man in the world and it is the educators business to see that he reaches it, if not by formative, then by selective processes.  This selection is badly made in our present state of civilization.  It depends to a large extent upon circumstances remote from the training itself—­upon caprice, either that of the person to be trained or of his parents, upon accidents of birth or situation, upon a thousand irrelevant things; but in every case there are elements present in the training itself that aid in determining it.  A young man begins to study medicine, and he finds that his physical repulsion for work in the dissecting-room can not be overcome.