732 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The modern gymnasium is a necessary auxiliary to every well- 

 equipped college, but it owes much of its increasing usefulness and 

 importance to the fact that it is a training-place for athletes. There 

 is no real antagonism between the athletic field and the gymnasium. 

 It is not necessary to depreciate one in order to exalt the other. Ex- 

 isting side by side, and both rightly used, they will best contribute to 

 the evolution of the " typical man." 



THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE : A PROGRAMME. 



By Professob T. H. HUXLEY. 



THE vast and varied procession of events which we call Nature 

 affords a sublime spectacle and an inexhaustible wealth of attract- 

 ive problems to the speculative observer. If we confine our attention 

 to that aspect which engages the attention of the intellect, Nature 

 appears a beautiful and harmonious whole, the incarnation of a fault- 

 less logical process, from certain premises in the past to an inevitable 

 conclusion in the future. But if she be regarded from a less elevated, 

 but more human, point of view ; if our moral sympathies are allowed 

 to influence our judgment, and we permit ourselves to criticise our 

 great mother as we criticise one another — then our verdict, at least so 

 far as sentient Nature is concerned, can hardly be so favorable. 



In sober truth, to those who have made a study of the phenomena 

 of life as they are exhibited by the higher forms of the animal world, 

 the optimistic dogma that this is the best of all possible worlds will 

 seem little better than a libel upon possibility. It is really only another 

 instance to be added to the many extant, of the audacity of a priori 

 speculators who, having created God in their own image, find no diffi- 

 culty in assuming that the Almighty must have been actuated by the 

 same motives as themselves. They are quite sure that, had any other 

 course been practicable, he would no more have made infinite suffering 

 a necessary ingredient of his handiwork than a respectable philoso- 

 pher would have done the like. 



But even the modified optimism of the time-honored thesis of 

 physico-theology, that the sentient world is, on the whole, regulated 

 by principles of benevolence, does but ill stand the test of impartial 

 confrontation with the facts of the case. No doubt it is quite true 

 that sentient Nature affords hosts of examples of subtle contrivances 

 directed toward the production of pleasure or the avoidance of pain ; 

 and it may be proper to say that these are evidences of benevolence. 

 But if so, why is it not equally proper to say of the equally numerous 

 arrangements, the no less necessary resiilt of which is the production 

 of pain, that they are evidences of malevolence ? 



If a vast amount of that which, in a piece of human workmanship. 



