22 STRUGGLE AMONGST ANIMALS 



converts, to whom, as a botanist, the conception of 

 a set of plants actively exterminating another 

 would have been only ludicrous, and to Lyell, the 

 geologist, who had devoted his life to refuting the 

 catastrophic theory of the past history of the earth, 

 and to replacing it by a theory of slow and uniformi- 

 tarian change. In the vast clamour of invective and 

 abuse with which Darwin's work was assailed, every 

 weapon that fear could barb or malice could poison 

 was employed. I cannot conceive but that if the 

 struggle for existence had been presented by Darwin, 

 or received by his contemporary opponents, in any 

 sense corresponding with the German view, the 

 point would have been taken eagerly and denounced 

 with all the vigour of outraged morality. But it 

 was not so. The attacks were directed against the 

 dethroning of the Book of Genesis, the descent of 

 man from apes, what Carlyle called the " monkey 

 damnification of mankind," the replacement of 

 design by adaptation, the inferred removal from the 

 world of life of the immediate interference of Provi- 

 dence. It was only later, when poets and popular 

 writers got to work, that the struggle for existence 

 acquired the special significance of fierceness and 

 cruelty, became an expression of nature, "red in 

 tooth and claw." 



We get still further away from the German con- 

 ception of war between nations as an example of the 

 struggle for existence when we approach the facts of 

 nature more closely. Sir Ray Lankester, so far as I 

 remember, in a criticism of M. Paul Bourget's 

 Divorce, has already called attention to a common 

 misunderstanding of the hypothesis. One species is 



