618 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Clearly the only way to find an answer to this question is to 

 go to Nature itself and examine the principles upon which God 

 has deemed it wise to order the living population of the world. 



Doing this, we find living upon the world at present at least 

 272,090 different species of animals, the number of individuals in 

 each species being beyond computation or expression. We also 

 know that 39,925 species, with their countless numbers of indi- 

 viduals, have succumbed in the struggle for life and become 

 extinct.* 



Now, it has been ordained, in the perfect mercy of God, that 

 each individual of this innumerable population be born, live for a 

 little time, and die. With many species, birth itself is painful. 

 With all, life is a continuous struggle and terminates in what is 

 commonly called "the agony of death." Few, at least of the 

 higher animals, struggle out the full measure of their days and 

 die in peace. The vast majority are starved to death, or famished 

 and scorched to death by heat and drought, buried in the burning 

 debris of volcanoes or in snows and frozen to death, or are beaten 

 to death by hail or drowned in floods. And in and through all 

 this is the desperate struggle to find a grain of food, a drop of 

 water, a little shelter, a foothold in the flood, a way out of the 

 fiery hail or burning forest. 



But harsh as is the relation between animal life and the phys- 

 ical world, still more severe are the relations of animals to one 

 another. Here we see the weaker preyed on by the stronger 

 mercilessly, and behold the array of vivisectional instruments 

 the teeth and jaws, the beaks and talons, the claws and fangs, 

 developed for this purpose. Here the animals that escape the 

 accidents of the physical world perish most miserably, are lacer- 

 ated, torn limb from limb, are slowly crushed in serpents' coils or 

 slowly swallowed alive. And again in all this is the last, prob- 

 ably of many, flight for dear life, the last convulsive effort to tear 

 loose from the teeth or talons. Certain plants, even, are carnivor- 

 ous, and entrap and digest living animals. More than all this, 

 among certain animals, the males fight to the death for possession 

 of the females of the species. 



Still more terrible, many animals and plants become parasitic, 

 and suck from day to day the life-blood of their hosts. Un- 

 doubtedly the greatest distress to which the animal kingdom is 

 subjected occurs under this head. Some of the many diseases 

 producing microbes become established in the animal. The dis- 



* Leunis. Synopsis der Thierkunde, vol. ii, p. 1176, Hanover, 1886. The above is 

 merely the number of species known to Leunis in 1886, and by no means the entire number 

 inhabiting the earth. Lord Walsingham estimates that there are upward of two million 

 species of insects alone. (Entomological News, April, 1890, p. 58.) 





