550 



business man who lives within his income will finally dispossess his 

 shiftless competitor who can never pay his debts, the well-adjusted 

 aquatic animal will in time crowd out its poorly-adjusted competi- 

 tors for food and for the various goods of life. Consequently we 

 may believe that in the long run and as a general rule those species 

 which have survived, are those which have reached a fairly close adjust- 

 ment in this particular.' 



Two ideas are thus seen to be sufficient to explain the order evolved 

 from this seeming chaos ; the first that of a general community of inter- 

 ests among all the classes of organic beings here assembled, and the sec- 

 ond that of the beneficent power of natural selection which compels such 

 adjustments of the rates of destruction and of multiplication of the 

 various species as shall best promote this common interest. 



Have these facts and ideas, derived from a study of our aquatic 

 microcosm, any general application on a higher plane ? We have here an 

 example of the triumphant beneficence of the laws of life applied 

 to conditions seemingly the most unfavorable possible for any mutually 

 helpful adjustment. In this lake, where competitions are fierce and con- 

 tinuous beyond any parallel in the worst periods of human history ; where 

 they take hold, not on goods of life merely, but always upon life itself ; 

 where mercy and charity and sympathy and magnanimity and all the vir- 

 tues are utterly unknown ; where robbery and murder and the deadly 

 tyranny of strength over weakness are the unvarying rule ; where what 

 we call wrong-doing is always triumphant, and what we call goodness 

 would be immediately fatal to its possessor, — even here, out of these hard 

 conditions, an order has been evolved which is the best conceivable 

 without a total change in the conditions themselves ; an equilibrium has 

 been reached and is steadily maintained that actually accomplishes for all 

 the parties involved the greatest good which the circumstances will at 

 'ill permit. In a system where life is the universal good, but the destruc- 

 tion of life the well-nigh universal occupation, an order has spontaneous- 

 ly arisen which constantly tends to maintain life at the highest limit — a 

 limit far higher, in fact, with respect to both quality and quantity, 

 than would be possible in the absence of this destructive conflict. Is there 

 not, in this reflection, solid ground for a belief in the final beneficence 

 of the laws of organic nature? If the system of life is such that a har- 

 monious balance of conflicting interests has been reached where every 

 element is either hostile or indifferent to every other, may we not trust 

 much to the outcome where, as in human affairs, the spontaneous ad- 

 justments of nature are aided by intelligent effort, by sympathy, and by 

 self-sacrifice? 



iPor a fulltr statt'iiient of this argument, see Bui. Ul. State l.ab. Nat. Hist. 

 Vol. I, No. 3. pages 5 to 10. 



