Canterbury Pieces | Page 7

slowly breeding
sheep, and see how soon 500 ewes become 5000 sheep under
favourable circumstances. Suppose this sort of thing to go on for a
hundred million years or so, and where would be the standing room for
all the different plants and animals that would be now existing, did they
not materially check each other's increase, or were they not liable in
some way to be checked by other causes? Remember the quail; how
plentiful they were until the cats came with the settlers from Europe.
Why were they so abundant? Simply because they had plenty to eat,
and could get sufficient shelter from the hawks to multiply freely. The
cats came, and tussocks stood the poor little creatures in but poor stead.
The cats increased and multiplied because they had plenty of food and
no natural enemy to check them. Let them wait a year or two, till they
have materially reduced the larks also, as they have long since reduced
the quail, and let them have to depend solely upon occasional dead
lambs and sheep, and they will find a certain rather formidable natural
enemy called Famine rise slowly but inexorably against them and
slaughter them wholesale. The first proposition then to which I demand
your assent is that all plants and animals tend to increase in a high
geometrical ratio; that they all endeavour to get that which is necessary
for their own welfare; that, as unfortunately there are conflicting
interests in Nature, collisions constantly occur between different
animals and plants, whereby the rate of increase of each species is very
materially checked. Do you admit this?
C. Of course; it is obvious.
F. You admit then that there is in Nature a perpetual warfare of plant,
of bird, of beast, of fish, of reptile; that each is striving selfishly for its
own advantage, and will get what it wants if it can.
C. If what?
F. If it can. How comes it then that sometimes it cannot? Simply
because all are not of equal strength, and the weaker must go to the
wall.

C. You seem to gloat over your devilish statement.
F. Gloat or no gloat, is it true or no? I am not one of those
"Who would unnaturally better Nature By making out that that which is,
is not."
If the law of Nature is "struggle," it is better to look the matter in the
face and adapt yourself to the conditions of your existence. Nature will
not bow to you, neither will you mend matters by patting her on the
back and telling her that she is not so black as she is painted. My dear
fellow, my dear sentimental friend, do you eat roast beef or roast
mutton?
C. Drop that chaff and go back to the matter in hand.
F. To continue then with the cats. Famine comes and tests them, so to
speak; the weaker, the less active, the less cunning, and the less
enduring cats get killed off, and only the strongest and smartest cats
survive; there will be no favouritism shown to animals in a state of
Nature; they will be weighed in the balance, and the weight of a hair
will sometimes decide whether they shall be found wanting or no. This
being the case, the cats having been thus naturally culled and the
stronger having been preserved, there will be a gradual tendency to
improve manifested among the cats, even as among our own mobs of
sheep careful culling tends to improve the flock.
C. This, too, is obvious.
F. Extend this to all animals and plants, and the same thing will hold
good concerning them all. I shall now change the ground and demand
assent to another statement. You know that though the offspring of all
plants and animals is in the main like the parent, yet that in almost
every instance slight deviations occur, and that sometimes there is even
considerable divergence from the parent type. It must also be admitted
that these slight variations are often, or at least sometimes, capable of
being perpetuated by inheritance. Indeed, it is only in consequence of
this fact that our sheep and cattle have been capable of so much
improvement.
C. I admit this.
F. Then the whole matter lies in a nutshell. Suppose that hundreds of
millions of years ago there existed upon this earth a single primordial
form of the very lowest life, or suppose that three or four such
primordial forms existed. Change of climate, of food, of any of the

circumstances which surrounded any member of this first and lowest
class of life would tend to alter it in some slight manner, and the
alteration would have a tendency to perpetuate itself by inheritance.
Many failures would doubtless occur, but with the