the law of all life, animal as well as vegetable. From the
humble hyssop on the wall to the towering cedar of Lebanon, from the
meek and lowly amoeba--which has no more character or individuality than
any other pin-point of jelly--to the lordly tyrant {9} man, the rule is
inevitable and invariable.

Life is sown broadcast only to be followed almost immediately by a
destruction nearly as swift. Nature creates by the million apparently
that she may destroy by the myriads. She gives life one instant only
that she may snatch it away the next. The main difference is that the
higher we ascend the less lavish is the creation and the less sweeping
the destruction.

Thus, while probably but one fish out of a thousand reaches maturity, of
1,000 children born 604 attain adult age; that is, Nature flings aside
999 out of every 1,000 fish as useless for {10} her purposes, and two
out of every five human beings.

------

MANY see in this relentless weeding out and destruction of her inferior
products a remarkable illustration of the wisdom of Nature's methods.
What would they think of a workman so bungling that two-fifths of the
products of his handicraft were only fit for destruction?

The "struggle for existence" is a murderous scramble to get rid of this
vast surplusage. The "survival of the fittest" is the success of the
minority in {11} demonstrating that the majority are superfluous. It is
the Kilkenny-cat episode multiplied by infinity. It will be remembered
that the whole trouble arose from the common belief that two cats were a
surplus of one for the Kilkenny environment.

Darwin's theory recognizes in this super-fecundity of nature a most
potent adjunct for improvement He says, in fact, that the impossibility
of providing subsistence for more than a fraction of the multitudinous
creation causes a mortal struggle in which the weaker and inferior are
exterminated and only the stronger and superior survive. These in turn,
have offspring like the leaves {12} of the forest, which in like turn
are winnowed out by alien enemies and reciprocal extermination, and
thus the process goes on with the sanguinary regularity of the King
of Dahomey's administration of the internal economy of his realm. The
benignity of this method of arranging the order of things is not so
apparent as a member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals might desire.

------

BUT our opinion of