44 NO STRUGGLE NO SELECTION 



eliminated by Nature. He saw their great produc- 

 tiveness, and consequently conceived that they 

 swarmed in numbers. He therefore set himself to 

 devise a theoretical explanation of their elimina- 

 tion. He accordingly, after perusing Malthus' Essay 

 on Population, conceived himself at liberty to 

 posit a universal reign of misery over all organic 

 life, and to formulate his struggle for existence, in 

 which the vast majority of the food-seekers belonging 

 to Nature's prolific species perish by famine or by the 

 tooth and claw of individuals of their own or of other 

 species, while the few survivors survive from their pos- 

 sessing advantageous individual variations or differences 

 slightly better than were possessed by those who were 

 starved to death, or were mangled and torn, by their 

 competitors in the great and complex battle of life. 



" Upon his struggle for existence he has made his 

 whole evolutionary system rest. This single narrow 

 point is its fundamental principle, upon which it 

 reposes as an inverted cone upon its apex. If, then, it 

 be found that Nature in her beneficent and guardian 

 care for the well-being of her sentient offspring elimi- 

 nates by a remedial ordinance her excess of births 

 before the young become food-seekers, to what end 

 exist variations that give survival in the struggle 

 for existence ? Yes, I ask, to what end do these 

 variations exist if they are never called into action ? 

 The cone can no longer rest upon its apex ; the evolu- 

 tionary system, deprived of its fundamental principle, 

 falls with a crash." 



