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From the spot where I met Pedro Nunes--quite close to the junction of the Canuma River with the Madeira River--going down by river it would have been possible to reach Manaos in two or three days. Dom Pedro Nunes, however, with his expedition, could not return, nor sell me a boat, nor lend me men; so that I thought my best plan was to go back with him up the River Canuma and then the Secundury River, especially when I heard from the trader that the latter river came from the south-east--which made me think that perhaps I might find a spot at its most south-easterly point where the distance would not be great to travel once more across the forest, back to my men whom I had left near the Tapajoz.

No more was said; Dorothea was too much jarred to recover her temper and behave so as to show that she admitted any error in herself. She was disposed rather to accuse the intolerable narrowness and the purblind conscience of the society around her: and Celia was no longer the eternal cherub, but a thorn in her spirit, a pink-and-white nullifidian, worse than any discouraging presence in the "Pilgrim's Progress." The _fad_ of drawing plans! What was life worth--what great faith was possible when the whole effect of one's actions could be withered up into such parched rubbish as that? When she got out of the carriage, her cheeks were pale and her eyelids red. She was an image of sorrow, and her uncle who met her in the hall would have been alarmed, if Celia had not been close to her looking so pretty and composed, that he at once concluded Dorothea's tears to have their origin in her excessive religiousness. He had returned, during their absence, from a journey to the county town, about a petition for the pardon of some criminal.

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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