296 THE ISSUES OF LIFE 



ence. When an avalanche or a landslip, on any scale we 

 please, or a sudden fall of temperature, or a great drought, 

 or any catastrophe wipes out whole regiments of living crea- 

 tures, the struggle for existence is not illustrated, for the 

 essential idea in the concept of struggle is that the living 

 individual answers back. When on the summer evening the 

 mayflies rise like a living mist from the quiet reaches of 

 the river, and in some cases end their ephemeral aerial life 

 before the twilight is past, there is assuredly great mortality, 

 but there is not in the dying any struggle for existence. 

 They die off in the crisis of giving origin to the next gener- 

 ation, and as they may have spent two or three years of 

 larval sub-aquatic life they may be at their death quite old 

 as insects count age. Similarly, when the baleen whale rush- 

 ing through the waves engulfs myriads of sea-butterflies in 

 the huge cavern of its mouth, there is great mortality, 

 but no struggle for existence. Nor is there when the 

 squirrel has a meal of beech-nuts, each of them a young 

 life. 



The essential idea, often missed, is that the struggle for 

 existence is the clash between life and its limitations, when 

 life insists on its rights and answers back. When organisms 

 react to their limitations and difficulties, when they do not 

 meet these passively, but thrust and parry, experiment and 

 actively evade, and in a hundred ways say " We will live ", 

 there is the struggle for existence. The essence of the 

 struggle is the endeavour after well-being. 



Another point, somewhat difficult at first sight, is that 

 inter-specific struggle for existence is not illustrated when 

 all the members of a species meet a difficulty by the same 

 adaptive response, the capacity for which is now ingrained 

 in their constitution. Thus many species offer interesting 



