CHAPTER V.

THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE.

Is it a fact that, in a state of nature, there is a struggle for existence on the part of living organisms generally?

Just on the spur of the moment, when we hear this question, we are apt to answer, Most assuredly there is. For lions and tigers, sharks and sword-fish, hawks and vultures, spiders, ants, and ichneumonidæ rush at once into our thoughts, and we quote to ourselves

"Of nature red in tooth and claw,

With ravine."

But the question is, With all that carnivorousness in beast and bird, in fish and insect, does not the balance of life remain pretty well the same?

Certainly the beds of the earth are but the graves of the extinct-whole genera have perished. That, however, may be, at least partly, due to catastrophes. Catastrophes do periodically occur, and with enormous sacrifice of life. There are deluges and there are droughts, there are ardours and there are rigours; and deluge or drought, ardour or rigour, the one or the other may be the premiss of a quite overwhelming slaughter. Nevertheless, ever again, from the miserablest remainssomehow is not the loss repaired and the balance made good-on the whole? On the whole only it must be,

seeing the vastness of what is extinct; which, however, may have other causes than even the droughts, deluges, ardours, rigours. Mr. Darwin himself at least seems to postulate such. He cannot imagine (Journal, p. 174) any possible catastrophe short of one that shook "the entire framework of the globe," destroying " about the same time the inhabitants of tropical, temperate, and arctic latitudes on both sides of it." Of course, it is not well possible to think of a struggle for existence in such a case as that. To suppose that it was just in mutual grips that all these animals choked the breath out of each other would involve curious results. In some cases, as we have seen, there are still living representatives of such extinct animals, and if it is to victory in battle that we are to attribute preservation, then the dwarfs, not seldom, must have got the better of the giants! It is the fossil kangaroos are gigantically the biggest; and six-inch armadillos replace their greatly more than six-foot predecessors of centuries ago in the Pampas.

As regards the general fact of extinction, it is true that there is no necessity of appeal to either resource. Disappearance beneath the moon entails not an exclusive reference to either battle or catastrophe. Sooner or later, everything that is perishes. Pterodactyles, Ichthyosauria, Plesiosauria, Macrauchenia, and all the rest of them, did not at least need to go in any other way than naturally

So.

Nor is it different with mankind. Savages we see that seem to creep in just at the touch of civilisation. But is it necessary ? What of the Negro? what of the Chinaman? what of the Jap? Nay, let the dwindling in question really result from some necessity in nature, what justification is there for the naming of that necessity struggle?

But, all that apart, what is the evidence of actual fact

1

in the question? What is the testimony of every shipman who has ever landed on a previously unknown shore? "Their tameness is shocking to me!" That in effect is the exclamation of every one of them in regard to the animals they see. Mr. Darwin himself, in his Journal, p. 400, quotes reports on the part of the earlier visitors to such islands as the Falklands, Bourbon, Tristan d'Acunha, where what creatures they find are always "so tame as to suffer themselves to be caught." It is impossible to think of struggle and strife in such circumstances. Nay, the same tameness prevails in such places even when there are "rapacious animals" present, such as "foxes, hawks, and owls," and when battle to some. extent must be: battle-but not possibly, as is plain at a glance, butchery. Nor is this state of the case confined to islands. Dr. Andrew Smith is quoted (p. 86) to have seen in one day's South African march rhinoceroses, giraffes, hippopotamuses, crocodiles, antelopes, lions, panthers, hyænas. Giraffes and antelopes could not very well defend themselves from the attacks of these latter carnivora, nevertheless there were "several herds" of them. Mr. F. C. Selous," the celebrated African hunter," according to the Scotsman (December 19, 1892) gives similar testimony: he "said it (the Fly District) was one enormous game preserve, swarming with buffalo, burchell zebras, and many species of antelope; lions were also very plentiful." Plentiful lion was not incompatible with still more plentiful antelope. For that is remarkable, the different sides on which the more plentiful and the less plentiful fall How many the tame compared with the wild-how few the fierce compared with the gentle, the carnivorous with the herbivorous! Will the struggle for life explain that? If the fierce destroy the gentle, the carnivora the herbi

1 Dr. Erasmus gives us the same testimony from Professor Gmelin and M. Bougainville (Zo. i. 158).

vora, how is it that any of the latter are left? Is not that what you mean by the struggle that this conquers that?-the strong the weak, etc? In the course of a

struggle, is it really the weak that you would expect to prevail? In a state of nature it is that that again and again surprises the abundance of the food. We shall presently find Mr. Darwin himself to remark upon it. Even in the very lowest strata, the "confervæ and animalcula" that feed swarm, countlessly swarm; nor in the ascent of the scale does the relative proportion in essentials cease. Take the passenger pigeon of North America, for example; "it breeds in such immense numbers as to darken the air for a considerable period when the flock. takes to flight." Cooper, in one of his novels, gives a most vivid description of these immense numbers. "The air is filled with them, rising layer over layer, in one solid blue mass that the eye cannot see the end of." As possible raptores for these man apart-we can find Cooper to talk, in the same neighbourhood, only of two eagles. With nature so prolific of life, what call is there for a struggle? what need?

Mr. Warburton Pike, in his The Barren Ground of Northern Canada, gives a striking picture of the numbers as well as tameness of the animals that migrate southwards before the approaching cold. All the south side of Mackay Lake, which is a hundred miles long, was alive, he says, "with moving beasts, while the ice seemed to be dotted all over with black islands, and still away on the northern shore, with the aid of glasses, we could see them coming like regiments on the march;" "they were very tame, and on several occasions I found myself right in the middle of a band." We may append the same moral to the great variety of birds which Dr. Macgregor describes as following the steamship on his voyage to Australia.

Mark Twain, in his Innocents at Home, assures us of the peaceful life of a most incongruous happy family in the South Seas: Schools of whales grew so tame that day after day they played about the ship among the porpoises and the sharks without the least apparent fear of us, and we pelted them with empty bottles." Of course we are never quite sure, though he seems serious here, that Mr. Mark is not at his fun as usual. Here is a picture from Bret Harte, however, which, though also in a work of fiction, must still be regarded as founding in fact: "It was very quiet and kam; there was squirrels over the roof, yellow-jackets and bees dronin' away, and kinder sleeping-like all round in the air, and jay-birds twitterin' in the shingles, and they never minded me." Mr. Hiram M'Kinstry was surprised into this look at nature; and we too, of a summer day, may allow ourselves to look and see some such scene for ourselves. M. Jules Verne, as we know, deals in fiction that can only be called altogether enormous; nevertheless, as we know also, the data by which he gives consistence to his fiction, are usually even mathematically true; we may, on the whole, rely on this picture of his: "Grazed herds of red antelopes, zebras, and buffaloes a white rhinoceros crossed the open-an onager was braying, and a troop of monkeys. were chasing each other among the trees-it was not so much the number, as the wonderful variety of the animals that surprised-it seemed like a diagram in which the painter had depicted each principal type of the animal kingdom--all that, in the virgin country where the wild beast was still the undisputed master of the soil, lived on in happiness, without a suspicion of danger."

There is an article in the July number of Temple Bar for 1889 descriptive of the immense variety of birds that may come to a pond to drink chaffinches, flycatchers, jackdaws, starlings, titmice, nuthatches, redstarts, thrushes,