THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE. 143 
would lead to the same result, viz: that the fittest survive in 
the struggle for life. It is also a fair inference to draw, that as 
races and improved strains are produced in the same species, 
so different species themselves are evolved by the operation of 
the same laws of Nature. The only thinkable alternative is 
to believe that each species is the result of a special act of 
creative power. To take one instance, that the Almighty first 
designed a beetle to bore galleries in the substance of, and 
destroy, the tree which He Himself had made, and then 
created an Ichneumon fly with a sufficiently long ovipositor 
to lay eggs in the larva feeding in its gallery, the fly itself, 
with its own body fulfilling the purpose of providing food for 
other animal life, and soon. Of course, this may have been 
the fact, and it may also be a fact that no drop of rain can fall 
to the ground without a special and individual Divine order. 
But is it not much more in accordance with all we have been 
taught, and all which we can observe with our faculties, finite 
though they may be, that the Phenomena both of the in- 
organic and living worlds are the result of laws impressed at 
the beginning, upon matter and life, by the Creator, and that 
the occasions of supernatural or miraculous interposition have 
been, and will be, few and far between. 
I think that I can now justify the proposition that ‘* Nature 
red in tooth and claw with ravine,” is cruel, and that this 
cruelty has also its beneficient side. Although suffering and 
death may be the lot of countless myriads of individuals, 
literally improved out of existence, the net result is the im- 
provement of the race or type, giving it a better chance to 
exist as a whole, since it has become more in harmony with 
the surroundings. But change the surroundings, and the 
acquired adaptations become, not only useless, but an actual 
source of weakness, and the more highly specialised the type, 
the less plastic it has become, and the more certain is it to 
disappear in the struggle. Where are now the gigantic flying 
reptiles and other ‘“‘ Dragons of the Prime?” Where the 
