468 THU POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



age health of the community, but the process could scarcely be called 

 curative or rectifying. 



If, therefore, we believe in natural selection, let us believe in it 

 as it is, and be content to speak of it as it is. JOet us not make a god 

 of what is, in its essence, the very negation of intelligent action. In 

 regard to the doctrine of immortality, there is little need for alarm, 

 so far as the teachings of science are concerned. Science does not 

 attack it ; and if the theological grounds on which it has been received 

 hold good, then the doctrine holds good. Let us have our own tele- 

 ology if we will, only let us not mix it up with our science, seeing 

 that it can only embarrass the growth of the latter. All will be well 

 if we keep everything in its own place, observing proper metes and 

 bounds. 



•♦«» 



FOOD AND FEEDmO. 



By grant ALLEN. 



WHEN a man and a bear meet together casually in an American for- 

 est, it makes a great deal of difference, to the two parties con- 

 cerned at least, whether the bear eats the man or the man eats the bear. 

 We haven't the slightest difficulty in deciding afterward which of the 

 two, in each particular case, has been the eater, and which the eaten. 

 Here, we say, is the grizzly that ate the man ; or, here is the man that 

 smoked and dined off the hams of the grizzly. Basing our opinion 

 upon such familiar and well-known instances, we are apt to take it 

 for granted far too readily that between eating and being eaten, be- 

 tween the active and the passive voice of the verb edo, there exists 

 necessarily a profound and impassable native antithesis. To swallow 

 an oyster is, in our own personal histories, so very different a thing 

 from being swallowed by a shark that we can hardly realize at first 

 the underlying fundamental identity of eating with mere coalescence. 

 And yet, at the very outset of the art of feeding, when the nascent 

 animal first began to indulge in this very essential animal practice, one 

 may fairly say that no practical difference as yet existed between the 

 creature that ate and the creature that was eaten. After the man and 

 the bear had finished their little meal, if one may be frankly metaphori- 

 cal, it was impossible to decide whether the remaining being was the 

 man or the bear, or which of the two had swallowed the other. The 

 dinner having been purely mutual, the resulting animal represented both 

 the litigants equally ; just as, in cannibal New Zealand, the chief who 

 ate up his brother chief was held naturally to inherit the goods and 

 chattels of the vanquished and absorbed rival, whom he had thus liter- 

 ally and physically incorporated. 



A jelly-speck, floating about at his ease in a drop of stagnant 



