TOOTH AND CLAW 



as all discipline and all insensible modifications and 

 adaptations under the pressure of environment are 

 cruel; it is good in the guise of evil; it is the stem 

 beneficence of impartial law. The greater the power 

 of adaptation, the more fit is the animal or plant to 

 survive, and this power of adaptation is mainly 

 what distinguishes living bodies from non-living. 

 Inanimate bodies tend to adjust themselves to one 

 another through mechanical laws; animate bodies 

 tend to adapt themselves to one another and to 

 their environment through vital law. 



The struggle for existence is for the most part a 

 struggle with inanimate nature — with climate, soil, 

 wind, flood. A peaceful struggle is going on all 

 around us at all times, among men as among ani- 

 mals and plants: a struggle to live, to compel Nature 

 to yield us the things needed for our lives. It is not 

 often competition — an effort to win what another 

 must lose; it is an effort to seize and appropriate the 

 elements that all may have on equal terms, by the 

 exercise of strength, industry, wit, prudence. Life is 

 predaceous only to a limited extent. In the wilds, in 

 the jungle, one form devours another form, but na- 

 ture compensates. A fuller measure of life is given to 

 those forms that are the prey of other forms; they 

 are more prolific. The rats and mice are vastly more 

 prolific than the weasels or the owls that feed upon 

 them; the rabbits have ten young to one of their 

 enemy, the fox; the lesser birds greatly outnumber 



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