i 4 NO STRUGGLE NO SELECTION 



with you that our limited tract of jungle would not 

 contain a sufficiency of their natural food for 2300 or 

 even for 1200 tigers, young and parents together, 

 for any length of time, but it would certainly do so 

 for a space until their necessary food was reduced to a 

 vanishing point. You must surely perceive that if 

 Nature let loose upon them such a multitude of 

 devourers, their natural prey would be exterminated, 

 and the end would be the extermination by famine of 

 all the tigers themselves, parents and progeny." 



" But," exclaimed my interlocutor, " I do not perceive 

 what conclusion you are making for. You admit that 

 the offspring of the hundred pairs of tigers amount 

 in a generation to 2100 individuals, and that of these 

 1900 must be eliminated before they begin to pro- 

 create their kind. Yet you appear to be arguing at 

 one time against the very possibility of their being 

 eliminated, and at another against the very possibility 

 of their existing at all in such numbers." 



" Your inference," I answered, " is perhaps not un- 

 reasonable. If the 1900 doomed tigers enter into the 

 competition of life, then when we look at the con- 

 ditions and phenomena of their feral existence we are 

 constrained to admit that very few of them are 

 destroyed by individuals of their own species or by 

 individuals of other species. Sufficient is known and 

 testified to by the numerous hunters of the larger 

 felidse and other big game, to convince us that these 

 creatures undergo no measurable thinning of their 

 numbers by internecine warfare. While, again, if we 



