2O 



NO STRUGGLE NO SELECTION 



youthful prime? It is indeed to prevent such a 

 struggle for existence, and to preserve her offspring 

 from such a fate, that she painlessly eliminates them 

 in the earliest stage of existence. As for reproducing 

 her offspring in numbers that appear unnecessarily 

 large, she has a very practical and important end to 

 serve, namely, in the case of any sudden destruction 

 falling upon any of her species, to provide the means 

 of its speedily recovering its numbers : while the 

 waste of life is of no moment, and its seeming heart- 

 lessness is discounted by the fact of its entailing no 

 misery or suffering. You do not exclaim against her 

 waste of life when you see Nature producing from a 

 plant thousands of seeds of which only one will come 

 to maturity. The same principle prevails in the 

 animal kingdom as in the vegetable, and its action 

 is accompanied with as little pain in the one as in the 

 other. Such a principle as the struggle for existence 

 is one which Nature with all her divine heart abhors. 

 I shall now endeavour to answer your question as to 

 how the immature offspring are deleted. 

 7 " When I first turned my attention to the task of 

 endeavouring to ascertain, if it were possible to do so, 

 the manner in which Nature deletes her excess of re- 

 production, I was not long in perceiving the force of the 

 considerations which we have passed under review, and 

 in arriving at the inevitable conclusion that there must 

 be some check imposed by Nature which acts before the 

 young appear as food-seekers, and which in every luiunt 

 that is fully stocked with its feral inhabitants must 



