THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE n 



or 100 pairs, survive to take the place of their parents 

 and to procreate their kind. 



Let me here give the outlines of a conversation 

 which took place between myself and a friend, who is 

 still a young man and imagines himself to be a con- 

 firmed disciple of Darwin ; but I think he is only 

 conventionally so, and because he entertains the belief 

 that a doctrine accepted by all scientific thinkers must 

 be true. 



I asked him if he found it possible to believe that in 

 the above mentioned area of the jungle there survive 

 in each generation from the struggle for existence 

 200 tigers by virtue of possessing individual variations 

 which give them some slight advantage over the others, 

 who to the number of 1900 perish from possessing 

 less advantageous variations. 



My friend answered : " Surely. The fact that it is 

 so seems to me to be an inevitable conclusion. You 

 admit that the necessary elimination takes place in the 

 great and terrible struggle for existence. Is it not 

 obvious that the 200 who survive can only survive 

 from having proved themselves the fittest to survive ? 

 They are therefore naturally selected ; the weakest, as 

 happens all throughout the realm of organic life, 

 having gone to the wall and perished." 



" Softly," I replied. " Let us leave out for the 

 present what I admit or do not admit, and consider the 

 actual conditions of the feral life of the tiger. Here 

 we have 200 tigers which you tell me have been 

 naturally selected to survive as being the fittest, 



