Nature Sketches in Temperate America: A Series of Sketches and Popular Account of Insects, Birds, and Plants, Treated from Some Aspects of Their Evolution and Ecological Relations

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A. C. McClurg, 1911 - 451 páginas
 

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Página 9 - I may be allowed to personify the natural preservation or survival of the fittest, cares nothing for appearances, except in so far as they are useful to any being. She can act on every internal organ, on every shade of constitutional difference, on the whole machinery of life. Man selects only for his own good : Nature only for that of the being which she tends.
Página 19 - If it could be proved that any part of the structure of any one species had been formed for the exclusive good of another species, it would annihilate my theory, for such could not have been produced through natural selection.
Página 11 - ... nests. An action, which we ourselves require experience to enable us to perform, when performed by an animal, more especially by a very young one, without experience, and when performed by many individuals in the same way, without their knowing for what purpose it is performed, is usually said to be instinctive.
Página 7 - There is no exception to the rule that every organic being naturally increases at so high a rate, that, if not destroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair. Even slow-breeding man has doubled in twenty-five years, and at this rate, in less than a thousand years, there would literally not be standing room for his progeny.
Página 67 - In the tropics there are thousands of species of insects which rest during the day clinging to the bark of dead or fallen trees; and the greater portion of these are delicately mottled with gray and brown tints, which though symmetrically disposed and infinitely varied, yet blend so completely with the usual colours of the bark, that at two or three feet distance they are quite undistinguishable.
Página 7 - What a struggle between the several kinds of trees must here have gone on during long centuries, each annually scattering its seeds by the thousand ; what war between insect and insect — between insects, snails, and other animals with birds and beasts of prey — all striving to increase, and all feeding on each other or on the trees or their seeds and seedlings, or on the other plants which first clothed the ground and thus checked the growth of the trees...
Página 9 - Under nature, the slightest difference of structure or constitution may well turn the nicely balanced scale in the struggle for life, and so be preserved. How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! how short his time! and consequently how poor will his products be, compared with those accumulated by nature during whole geological periods. Can we wonder, then, that nature's productions should be far "truer...
Página 334 - ... it. After gentle, but repeated efforts, the point of the instrument is finally inserted between the tissues of the leaf, and gradually pushed in to more than half its length. As soon as the cavity is formed, the egg is extruded, and passed slowly between the semi-transparent blades of the ovipositor. As the egg leaves the ovipositor the latter is gradually withdrawn, while the egg remains in the leaf, retained in its place probably by a viscid fluid that is exuded with it.
Página 68 - Assuming that an insect originally happened to resemble in some degree a dead twig or a decayed leaf, and that it varied slightly in many ways, then all the variations which rendered the insect at all more like any such object, and thus favoured its escape, would be preserved, whilst other variations would be neglected and ultimately lost ; or, if they rendered the insect at all less like the imitated object, they would be eliminated.

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