CHAP, vii EVOLUTION IN DARWIN 63 



nature, a fact or aspect of things which he speedily 

 traced throughout all living nature, vegetable or animal. 

 But the doctrine of natural selection of survival of the 

 fittest l of improvement of species through the struggle, 

 and gradual development of new species that was 

 Darwin's own brilliant corollary. He perceived that 

 selection was sure to accompany struggle, if at least 

 there were any differences or variations separating 

 competitors from each other. The best man, or brute, 

 or plant must win, upon the average, and in the long- 

 run, if only there were better and worse, better and best, 

 blended in the competition. Otherwise struggle might 

 mean deadlock and mutual exhaustion, as of two equally 

 matched armies after a long campaign, and general doom 

 to extinction, as of the survivors from a wreck when 

 food runs short. But variations do notoriously exist. 

 Nature, which, " red in tooth and claw," unmistakably 

 asserts the fact of struggle, not less clearly reveals the 

 fact of selection with its two sides of defeat and victory, 

 and with its basis in a tendency to vary. This variation is 

 mainly conceived as congenital. Some are born better, 

 some worse. Not only are the offspring of better parents 

 better equipped ; within the same family, as experience 

 shows, some are better equipped than the rest, some sink 

 below the average. How far this tendency to vary went, 

 Darwin never dogmatically affirmed. It was enough for 

 him usually to treat it as casual and therefore as 

 undefined. The great concern of nature, the arch 

 examiner, was not to secure good candidates, but to 

 secure a plentiful flow. If there were but enough, some 

 good specimens would assuredly be found. So said, 

 so done ; teeming nature, as we call it, brought forth 

 all things abundantly, ay, and superabundantly ; not 



1 Spencer's phrase, however. 



