TRAGEDY IN NATURE 151 



played a very important part in the competition for food 

 supplies. 



The life stories of different creatures are by no means 

 equally easy or equally difficult generally it is towards 

 the latter quality that the complicated history leads us. 

 Some animals have more enemies than others, some pass 

 through stages which expose them to more varied dangers; 

 indeed, the more complex the life before reaching maturity 

 the less the chance of attaining it. But there is compensa- 

 tion, or none of the weaker brethren could survive; the 

 creature with a simple, shadowed life produces few young, 

 and the required number, a fair proportion of the whole, 

 come to their own ; the one with many foes and a long and 

 precarious youth presents the world with an overflowing 

 family. The cod with its two to five million eggs might 

 mourn the death of five million infants and leave its 

 fortune to two and only two ; the rest, if it is any satisfac- 

 tion to it to know, have probably gone to improve the 

 stock of other species, not excluding the cod itself; indeed, 

 it is not at all unlikely that many cod thrive on their own 

 offspring. 



The guillemot, on the other hand, a bird which no 

 doubt assists in keeping down the surplus population 

 of the cod, has but to lose a few, perhaps two or three, 

 out of its annual output of one big egg. The mortality 

 of the species is small, yet when we find the storm-battered 

 bodies of this pelagic species thick along the tide line we 

 think more seriously of it than the massacre of the millions 

 of possible cods. Suppose that for a few seasons the cod 

 should have a dearth of enemies, say if some epidemic 

 or other catastrophe overtook the normal feeders on its 

 pelagic eggs and larvae, and a few thousands from each 

 roe came to maturity; wiiere would the food be in the 

 overstocked seas for the vast army of hungry cods ? 

 Nature, by the simple method of starving the unwanted, 



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