732 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



But what is of importance to notice in this place is that the grow- 

 ing disposition to consult past and surrounding facts before inaugu- 

 rating change belongs to the strictly scientific habit of mind ; and if 

 it is true that much laborious investigation seems for the time to be 

 thrown away, yet it seldom happens that complicated and far-reaching 

 changes are encountered without the assistance of a previous impartial 

 and deliberate inquiry of the kind here adverted to. The scientific 

 method, in Politics as elsewhere, is slowly and surely getting the bet- 

 ter of the empiric. 



-- 



THE ECONOMIC FUNCTION OF YICE. 



By JOHN McELEOY. 



JT^OR some inscrutable reason, which she has as yet given no hint 

 of revealing, Nature is wondrously wasteful in the matter of 

 generation. She creates a thousand where she intends to make use of 

 one. Impelled by maternal instinct, the female cod casts millions of 

 eggs upon the waters, expecting them to return after many days as 

 troops of interesting offspring. Instead, half the embryotic gadi are 

 almost immediately devoured by spawn-eaters, hundreds of thousands 

 perish in incubation, hundreds of thousands more succumb to the per- 

 ils attending ichthyic infancy, leaving but a few score to attain to adult 

 usefulness, and pass an honored old age, with the fragrance of a well- 

 spent life, in a country grocery. 



The oak showers down ten thousand acorns, each capable of pro- 

 ducing a tree. Three fourths of them are straightway diverted from 

 their arboreal intent, through conversion into food by the provident 

 squirrel and the improvident hog. Great numbers rot uselessly upon 

 the ground, and the few hundreds that finally succeed in germinating 

 grow up in a dense thicket, where at last the strongest smothers out 

 all the rest, like an oaken Othello in a harem of quercine Desdemonas. 



This is 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 amceba, which has no more character or individu- 

 ality than any other pin-point of jelly to the lordly tyrant, man, the 

 rule is inevitable and invariable. Life is sown broadcast, only to be 

 followed almost immediately by a destruction nearly as sweeping. Na- 

 ture creates by the million, apparently that she may destroy by the 

 myriad. 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 the creation, and the less sweeping the destruction. Thus, while 

 probably but one fish in a thousand reaches maturity, of every 1,000 

 children born 604 attain adult age. That is, Nature flings aside 999 



