362 THE INFLUENCE OF LIVING SURROUNDINGS. 



by their respective struggles for the same conditions of 

 existence. 



The competition for similar conditions. It is self-evident 

 that different animals, or different individuals of the same 

 species, must often come into antagonism in their search for food 

 or for other things. In such cases the struggle will be the 

 severest when they belong to the same species; for as they then 

 will have approximately the same aims and about the same 

 strength, skill, and powers of resistance, the combat for the 

 hunting ground, the female, or for dead prey must be more 

 severe than when the antagonists, belonging to different species, 

 have in consequence different needs and tastes, and exhibit a 

 conspicuous difference in their strength of body or in their 

 weapons of offence and defence. In the latter case even, under 

 certain circumstances, the struggle to obtain possession of the 

 same object may come to an issue without any personal combat ; 

 for if the two creatures attack the prey in a different manner 

 both may be satisfied before they come into collision, and a 

 personal combat will be averted. When, on the contrary, two 

 individuals of different species can apply the same, or nearly 

 similar, means for appropriating and keeping possession of the 

 booty, just as virulent a contest must ensue as between two 

 individuals of the same species. 



Any such direct battle between two animals, whether of the 

 same or of different species, must always result in selection. 

 The phrase ' Survival of the Fittest ' is a happy one, but it is a 

 somewhat rough and not perfectly exact expression of the oxit- 

 come of such cases ; for it is certainly not always the fact that 

 a species which is not qualified to conquer in such a personal 

 contest with one species not its own, must be equally incapable 

 of triumphing in a struggle with another, and so inevitably 

 perish. This could be the invariable result of such a struggle 

 only when the life of an individual or the existence of a species 

 depended solely, and in every particular, on those conditions 

 which had occasioned the strife of the two combatants. 



But, besides this, as has already been remarked on many 

 sides, this selection by direct personal combat does not depend, 

 as many imagine, exclusively on it and on the mode in 



