14 DARWINISM TO-DAY. 



of organisms may fairly be called a struggle. This is 

 obvious when it is active, as in actual personal 



battlin g for a P iece of food or in attempts to 

 capture prey or to escape capture, and less 

 obvious when it is passive, as in the endurance of stress of 

 weather, hunger, thirst, and untoward conditions of any 

 kind. The struggle is, or may be, for each individual 

 threefold in nature : ( i ) an active struggle or com- 

 petition with other individuals of its own kind for 

 space in the habitat, sufficient share of the food, and 

 opportunity to produce offspring in the way peculiar and 

 common to its species; (2) an active or passive struggle or 

 competition with the individuals of other species which may 

 need the same space and food as itself, or may need it or 

 its eggs or young for food, and (3) an active (or more 

 usually passive) struggle with the physico-chemical external 

 conditions of the world it lives in, as varying temperature 

 and humidity, storms and floods, and natural catastrophes; 

 of all sorts. For any individual or group of individuals any 

 of these forms of struggle may be temporarily ameliorated, 

 as is ( i ) the intra-specific struggle among the thousands of 

 honey-bee individuals living together altruistically in one 

 hive, or (2) the inter-specific struggle when two species 

 live together symbiotically as the hermit crab * Eupagurus 

 and the sea-anemone Podocoryne, or (3) the struggle 

 against untoward natural conditions as in special times or 

 places of highly favourable climate, etc. Or for any indi- 

 vidual or group of individuals all forms of the struggle may 

 be coincidently active and severe. The resultant of these 

 existing conditions is, according to Darwin and his followers, 

 an inevitable natural selection of individuals and of species. 

 Thousands must die where one or ten may live to maturity ' 

 (i. e., to the time of producing young). Which ten of the 

 thousand shall live depends on the slight but sufficient ad- 

 vantage possessed by ten individuals in the complex struggle I 



