DARWINISM. 27 



varied, the more fitted it might become for some habitat^ 

 from which it was completely cut off by a chain of 

 mountains, a rapid river, or a deep sea. As the com- 

 petition became more intense, variations would become 

 more and more valuable, enabling creatures to occupy 

 positions before untenable, ocean-depths, sandy shores, 

 holes in rocks, fresh-water lakes, tops of mountains, 

 branches of trees, the bodies of other living beings. 

 Some would be taught by necessity and enabled by 

 favourable variations to prey, as well as take up their 

 abode, on other creatures. And as the strife became 

 more and more urgent, all sorts of qualities that from 

 our point of view may seem noxious and degrading 

 might prove of the highest service and advantage to 

 their own possessors. Plants with sharp thorns and 

 envenomed hairs, poisonous snakes, trichinae and other 

 parasites horrible to man, would find their advantage 

 at our cost, or by unparalleled fertility would defy all 

 efforts to extirpate them. Some species would profit by 

 minuteness, others by size; others, in various ways, by 

 talons, beak, thread-like tongue, prehensile tail, or furry 

 coat ; and, just as men are said to go through fire and 

 water for the sake of money, so for the sake of preserva- 

 tion, no habit, no locality would be too uncongenial for 

 a species to develope adaptation thereunto. And, accord- 

 ingly, we find that the water-ouzel, which is a species of 

 thrush, subsists entirely by diving ; there is a tree- 

 climbing lobster in the Mauritius; there are fishes 

 which ramble about on the land, and one fish, the 



