Crossword-Solution: EPIZOA 6 letters, 4 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 17

The unlucky substitution of "survival of fittest" for "natural selection" has done much harm in consequence of the ambiguity of "fittest"--which many take to mean "best" or "highest"--whereas natural selection may work towards degradation: vide epizoa.

Almost every animal is a living poor-house, and harbors one or more species of _epizoa_ or _entozoa_, supplying them gratis, not only with a permanent home, but with all the necessaries and luxuries of life.

Shorty's skin was raw from head to foot from the depredations of the various tribes of "epizoa," as the physicians generalize them.

Yet in spite of the most recent objections to it, I hold that at very low grades _generatio œquivoca_ is very probable, and primarily indeed in the case of entozoa and epizoa, particularly such as appear in consequence of special cachexia of the animal organism.

Therefore as soon as the conditions of life of epizoa have appeared in consequence of certain chronic diseases, or cachexia, and in accordance with them, _pediculus capitis_ or _pubis_ or _corporis_ appears entirely of itself, and without any egg; and this notwithstanding the complex structure of these insects, for the putrefaction of a living animal body affords material for higher productions than that of hay in water, which only produces infusoria.