112 Review of Darwin 



into species. There is here a huge hiatus in the reasoning of 

 our author. We have already shown that an excessive import- 

 ance is attributed to artijScial or human selection ; but with all 

 the exaggeration of its powers, it has proved insufficient to change 

 one species into another. The pigeon, with all its varieties, is 

 still a pigeon, and, according to our author's own conclusive argu- 

 mentation, a rock-pigeon. It is not a wood-pigeon, or turtledove, 

 still less a partridge or a rook. But now we are asked to believe 

 that those same natural courses which break down all th« breeder's 

 elaborate distinctions so soon as his^breeds are allowed to intermix 

 and live in a natural way, are themselves able to take up the work 

 and do still greater marvels in the way of selection. Such a doc- 

 trine is self-contradictory, and, we believe wholly incapable of 

 proof; but let us see how this is attempted : 



As might have been anticipated, natural selection being either 

 creation or nothing, a new power is evoked as B,^primum mobile. 

 This is the " struggle for existence," a fancied warfare in nature, in 

 which the race is always to the swift and the battle to the strong, 

 and in which the struggle makes the strong stronger. In a pre- 

 vious chapter we have been told very truly that the reason why 

 the wealthy and skilful breeder succeeds in producing marked 

 races is that his animals are cared for and pampered, while the 

 savage and the poor man fail because their animals must struggle 

 for subsistence. Nature it appears takes the opposite way, and 

 improves her breeds by putting them through a course of toil and 

 starvation, a struggle not for happiness or subsistence, but for bare 

 existence. We can understand how this should deteriorate and 

 degrade species, as we know it has done in every case of the kind 

 that we have observed ; but how it should elevate or improve is 

 past comprehension. But does nature deserve to be charged with 

 such niggardliness, and with so concealing it that all the world 

 seems to be full of happiness and plenty, except where poor man 

 toils on in his poverty ? In looking for the proof of this strange 

 doctrine, we find stated in support of it only a number of isolated 

 and exceptional facts, many of them cases in which man inter- 

 feres with the equilibrium of nature ; and we have to fall back on 

 the general statement that the struggle for existence inevitably fol 

 lows from the high rate at which organic beings tend to increase 

 but this Malthusian doctrine, though good for a single species 

 viewed by itself, is false for the whole in the aggregate. Vege- 

 table life and the lower forms of animal life support the higher, 



