"The Council has a selective memory," A'Ran said in irritation.

Such definitions, then, are to be accepted, if at all, as definitions of type, selective designations of leading but not strictly universal features.

Selective reduction, for starters...

The adherence to type, the favourite conception of the transcendental morphologist, was seen to be nothing more than the expression of one of the laws of thremmatology, the persistence of hereditary transmission of ancestral characters, even when they have ceased to be significant or valuable in the struggle for existence, whilst the so-called evidences of design which was supposed to modify the limitations of types assigned to Himself by the Creator were seen to be adaptations due to the selection and intensification by selective breeding of fortuitous congenital variations, which happened to prove more useful than the many thousand other variations which did not survive in the struggle for existence.

But it is forgotten that both the plant and the soil enjoy special powers of selective absorption, which remove and fix the better constituents of the water and leave the less valuable.