36 NO STRUGGLE NO SELECTION 



destroyers do not increase in their haunts. But when 

 we consider that they do not struggle for existence as 

 individuals with other individuals of their own or of 

 other species, how, we may well ask, could they thus 

 be kept within due bounds if they multiplied so fast 

 as they would necessarily multiply if all the produc- 

 tion of young appeared as food-seekers in their native 

 habitats ? We are therefore constrained to the 

 conclusion that the enormous reproduction of the 

 carnivora do not all appear as food-seekers, but that 

 by far the greater number of them are eliminated 

 before they enter into competition with others for food. 

 " When I had brought the argument to this point, 

 I instanced one form of deletion of the excess of 

 reproduction that is known to prevail, both in the 

 feral state and in the state of domestication, among 

 certain species ; and averred that these form the only 

 species of prolific vertebrate mammals of whose 

 behaviour when the female gives birth to young, we 

 know anything. Accordingly, having no known facts 

 opposed to those of which, by my own observation, and 

 on the authority of others, I had become cognisant, 

 I formed the provisional hypothesis that the instinct 

 of the male which impels him to devour the newly 

 born offspring of the female is Nature's method of 

 eliminating the excess of her prolific feral tribes. 

 I argued, moreover, that this hypothesis, supposing it 

 to be true, fully accounts for the phenomena of feral 

 life, as, for instance, the fact that the young carnivora 

 found in their native haunts never appear to be more 



