82 DARWINISM TO-DAY. 



species. But they were dead all together, by the ill-chance 

 of position. In Lagunita, a small artificial lake on the 

 campus of Stanford University, water pours in from two or 

 three rivulets during the rainy season so as to fill it and 

 make it an abiding place for many aquatic organisms that 

 swim in or are washed in through the dikes. And thou- 

 sands of little fishes and water beetles and dragon-fly 

 .nymphs and the like live contentedly there for seven or eight 

 months. But with the rainless summer months come swift 

 evaporation and steady leakage, and by September all the 

 thousands of little fishes and insects lie dying there together 

 in the last few puddles. It is the hard luck of a fatal chance 

 against which all the variations in colour, in size, in scales, 

 in spines, and what not are as one as far as helping or sav- 

 ing any of the gasping possessors is concerned. 



One might go on tiresomely but one does not need to point 

 the moral of these tales. Wolff 15 has clearly fancied how 

 the fate of millions of tapeworms may hang on the recep- 

 tion in the German Reichstag of a clever speech for or 

 against meat laws. To go so far isn't necessary : the very 

 life-history of the tapeworm and of hundreds of similarly- 

 lived vermian parasites shows to what nearly absolute de- 

 gree chance rules their fate, and how utterly insignificant 

 a part in it miscellaneous individual variation can possibly 

 play. 



But aside from the part that what we may call fortune ie 

 of position plays in determining life or death among indi- 

 viduals, what of the actual rigour of the strug- 



le in those cases where death does not come 

 to thousands at a moment ; in the whale's 

 mouth, by catastrophe of flood or drouth, or by the elephant's 

 tread on the ant-hill? To this question of the rigour of 

 intra-specific struggle I have given some personal attention 

 in insect life, and while to detail observations here would 

 be impossible, I may say baldly that no such rigour of in- 



