climate most suitable, that is in the spring
of the temperate zone and at the commencement of the dry season in the
tropics. They grow vigorously, being supplied with abundance of food;
and when they reach maturity their lives are a continual round of
healthy excitement and exercise, alternating with complete repose. The
daily search for the daily food employs all their faculties and
exercises every organ of their bodies, while this exercise leads to the
satisfaction of all their physical needs. In our own case, we can give
no more perfect definition of happiness, than this exercise and this
satisfaction; and we must therefore conclude that animals, as a rule,
enjoy all the happiness of which they are capable. And this normal state
of happiness is not alloyed, as with us, by long periods--whole lives
often--of poverty or ill-health, and of the unsatisfied longing for
pleasures which others enjoy but to which we cannot attain. Illness, and
what answers to poverty in animals--continued hunger--are quickly
followed by unanticipated and almost painless extinction. Where we err
is, in giving to animals feelings and emotions which they do not
possess. To us the very sight of blood and of torn or mangled limbs is
painful, while the idea of the suffering implied by it is heartrending.
We have a horror of all violent and sudden death, because we think of
the life full of promise cut short, of hopes and expectations
unfulfilled, and of the grief of mourning relatives. But all this is
quite out of place in the case of animals, for whom a violent and a
sudden death is in every way the best. Thus the poet's picture of

"Nature red in tooth and claw
With ravine"

is a picture the evil of which is read into it by our imaginations, the
reality being made up of full and happy lives, usually terminated by the
quickest and least painful of deaths.

On the whole, then, we conclude that the popular idea of the struggle
for existence entailing misery and pain on the animal world is the very
reverse of the truth. What it really brings about, is, the maximum of
life and of the enjoyment of life with the minimum of suffering and
pain. Given the necessity of death and reproduction--and without these
there could have been no progressive development of the organic
world,--and it is difficult even to imagine a system by which a greater
balance of happiness could have been secured. And this view was
evidently that of Darwin himse