self necessary and good, the essential condition of progress.
But just as we to-day know well how hard it is to draw the line which
distinguishes a right self-seeking from the wrong, so it has been from
the outset. The distinction is a fine one, and the balance is easily
upset. We have but to suppose that this perversion of the right and
lawful happened at an early stage, to see that nothing more would have
been required to account for the subsequent heritage of woe.[16] After
speaking of the innocent "kind of comparative strife that we see in the
fields and forests around us," in which "there may be nothing that we
cannot reconcile with the perfect beneficence of the Great {65}
Designer and Creator," this writer goes on to say: "But the moment that
evolution has attained that point at which the struggle begins to
involve pain and unhappiness, it becomes quite another matter. The
moment that rudimentary but happy and congenial life begins to be
overshadowed by fear, or debased by conscious cruelty, the moment that
process of evolution begins to evolve not only cruel selfishness in its
most odious forms, but deceit and artifice and treacherous cunning in
the warfare which one animal wages with another, then I think you may
be certain of one of two things--either the Creator is not
all-benevolent, or that that scheme is somehow working out as He never
intended it should: there must have been some disturbing and hostile
influence."[17]

This is well put, but the interest of the book chiefly consists in its
attempts to show in detailed instances how things that are evil may
have been made so. The author boldly argues that, if the normal course
had been followed, "birds and beasts of prey and venomous reptiles
would never have been evolved." "Evolutionists," he says, "are agreed
that it is just the fierce struggle of created things that has produced
these birds and beasts of prey, and that there can be {66} little doubt
that it is the malignity of the struggle that has produced the venom of
so many reptiles."[18] Instances are given in which such venom may now
be developed as the result of rage or terror in an otherwise harmless
animal.

"A few years ago it was reported that the late M. Pasteur 'cultivated'
the poison of human saliva to such a point that he was able to produce
with it many of the effects of the most virulent snake poisons."[19]
Had they not been inflamed by the terror of the struggle for existence,