206 THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



insects to perish." Two or three months before this 

 he had ocular proof of the effect of a hailstorm, which 

 in a very limited area killed twenty deer, fifteen 

 ostriches, numbers of ducks, hawks, and partridges. 

 In the war of extermination that was ever before 

 the great naturalist's eye in South America, what is 

 it that favors a species' survival or determines its 

 extinction ? 



Not only is the struggle between the animals and 

 inanimate nature, the plants and inanimate nature, 

 plant and animal, rival animals, and rival plants ; it 

 goes on between man and his environment, and, very 

 fiercely, between man and man. Darwin was moved 

 by intense indignation at the slavery on the east coast 

 and the cruel oppression of the laborer on the west 

 coast. He was in close contact with the sanguinary 

 political struggles of South America, and with a war 

 of attempted extermination against the Indian. He 

 refers to the shocking but " unquestionable fact, that 

 [in the latter struggle] all the women who appear 

 above twenty years old are massacred in cold blood ! 

 When I exclaimed that this appeared rather inhu- 

 man, he [the informant] answered, 4 Why, what can 

 be done ? they breed so ! ' 



In all his travels nothing that Darwin beheld 

 made a deeper impression on his sensitive mind than 

 primitive man. " Of individual objects, perhaps noth- 

 ing is more certain to create astonishment than the 

 first sight in his native haunt of a barbarian of 

 man in his lowest and most savage state. One's mind 

 hurries back over past centuries, and then asks, could 

 our progenitors have been men like these ? ... I do 

 not believe it is possible to describe or paint the dif- 



