en to the shovel-footed
mole, while the chipmunk, who also burrows in the ground, has no special
tool to aid him in building his mound of earth; he is compelled to use
his soft, tender little nose as a pusher. When the soil which his feet
have loosened has accumulated at the entrance to his hole, he shoves it
back with his nose.

Even to some of her thistles Nature is partial. The Canada thistle sows
its seeds upon the wind like the common native thistle; then in addition
it sends a big root underground parallel with its surface, and just
beyond the reach of the plough, which sends up shoots every six or seven
inches, so that, like some other noxious weeds, it carries on its
conquests like a powerful besieging army, both below ground and above.

A bachelor of laws in Michigan writes me in a rather peremptory manner,
demanding an answer by return mail as to why robins are evenly
distributed over the country instead of collected in large numbers in
one locality; and if they breed in the South; and he insists that my
answer be explicit, and not the mere statement "that it is natural
law." I wonder that he did not put a special-delivery stamp on his
letter. He is probably wondering why I am so dilatory in answering.

There seems to be an inherent tendency in nearly all living things to
scatter, to seek new fields. They are obeying the first command--to
increase and multiply. Then it is also a question of food, which is
limited in every locality. Robins do not breed in flocks, but in pairs.
Every gas is a vacuum to every other gas; and every locality is a vacuum
to the different species of birds that breed there. The seed-eaters, the
fruit-eaters, the insect-eaters, and the omnivorous feeders, like the
robin--in other words, the sparrows, the flycatchers, the warblers--may
and do all live together in harmony in the same narrow area.

The struggle of which we have heard so much since Darwin's time is
mainly a natural sifting and distributing process, such as that going on
all about us by the winds and the waters. The seeds carried by the winds
do not thrive unless they chance to fall on suitable ground. All may be
"fit" to survive and yet fail unless they are also lucky. What so frail
as a spider's web, and yet how the spiders thrive! Nature gives the weak
many advantages.

There is a slow, bloodless struggle of one species with another--the
fleet with the slow, the cunning with the stupid, the sharp-eyed and
sharp-eared