66 DOMESTICATED ANIMALS AND PLANTS 



bighorn, and chamois it is the abiHty to cHmb where only the 

 eagles can follow, and to take flying leaps from crag to crag. 



All species and individuals not possessed of some such natural 

 advantage, or with whom the advantage has been rendered worth- 

 less, go down early in the struggle. Of course such great natural 

 calamities as fire and flood, making wholesale destruction, take 

 everything both good and bad, fit as well as unfit. Such events 

 come so infrequently and so suddenly that nothing can meet 

 their exactions. 



The fate of species, however, is not settled by these sudden 

 and calamitous events except in rare cases and for certain 

 localities.^ This fate is settled by the slow and relentless method 

 we have described, in which literally thousands of every species 

 undertake to supply the cravings of hunger and the needs ol 

 life to the best of their ability, but go down in the struggle to 

 defeat and death, while others carry on the struggle with occa- 

 sional success. These alone count in the line of descent. 



The individual and the race. It is, indeed, a savage picture 

 that we draw when we attempt to depict nature at work in her 

 workshop with living beings for her tools and her materials. 

 Everything is relentlessly pursuing its own advantage and spend- 

 ing its time in killing and eating or in being eaten in turn as it 

 surrenders to the inevitable, — a savage tearing mass of animated 

 matter spurred on by instincts not understood and by impulses 

 incapable of comprehension, the end of which sooner or later, j 

 whether successful or unsuccessful in the struggle, is death. 



Looked at in this large way, life at best is but a doleful picture, 

 for, as some one has remarked, the life of every animal in the , 

 wild is a constant terror and its end a tragedy. The pathos of 



I 



1 It is more than likely that such sweeping changes as the glacial epoch do 

 operate to exterminate species at wholesale off the face of the earth. Instances 

 are not wanting where species have been stranded by the retreating glacier, , 

 such as the wild primrose on Mount Washington and on the north side of a 

 single ledge in southern Michigan. Many species, too, were swept off as the 

 glacier advanced, and were unable to return with its retreat, as in England, 

 which has a much simpler flora than has France, just across the Channel. 



