7600 Notices of New Books. 



variation could influence any appreciable advantage in the struggle for 

 existence. Do we not see every grade of specific difference filling its 

 special .place, and varieties, species and genera, of every variety of 

 difference, associating their individuals, and yet all live and multiply ? 

 Those varieties which are obviously varieties and separated by the 

 smallest measures of difference, and would, therefore, Mr. Darwin tells 

 us, be involved in the closest competition, are generally found associ- 

 ated with their nearly allied species of identical habits, as many of 

 the closely resembling Veronicas. Linaria spuria and L. Elatine, 

 which are perhaps more closely resembling each other than any two 

 other species of the genus, occur more frequently together than sepa- 

 rately J and again, different genera, of largely diff'erent character and 

 power of persistence and reproduction, are closely associated without 

 engaging in that mutually extirpating struggle upon which Mr. Darwin's 

 theory of progression so much depends. How very few plants can be 

 said to occupy the ground so densely (as in a dense agricultural crop), 

 through a great reproductive power, as, by their close proximity, to 

 limit their further extension ! and, moreover, when mutual extirpation 

 does take place, it in is the earliest stages of development, before the 

 indidduals could be subjected to those mutually acting modifications 

 of character which Mr. Darwin says have been the steps leading to 

 specific diff'erences. Again : in the animal kingdom many parts of 

 the globe seem insufficiently slocked, or, in other words, the vegetation 

 would easily support a more extensive herbivorous life, which would 

 afford food and the consequent power of increase and extended do- 

 minion to carnivorous races. Take, for example, the prairies of S. 

 America, where the great bulk of vegetation suitable for the support 

 of herbivorous life year after year decays ; now the animals that are 

 sustained by it can scarcely be said to be competing with each other 

 for the means of subsistence, for we see in the rapid increase of the 

 domestic horse, introduced in the sixteenth century by the Spaniards, 

 that the inherent power of the prairies in supporting animal life was not 

 nearly made available by its native inhabitants; so that, there at least, 

 we ought to find, in full life, those intermediate grades which 

 Mr. Darwin tells us are extirpated where the means of support 

 are limited. Assuming even that the power of stamina, reproduction 

 and persistency is exactly correlated with all these diff'erences con- 

 stituting species, it is impossible to realize that such infinitely small 

 points of advantage accompanying the infinitely small steps of varia- 

 tion can, in their separate power, have any influence in Mr. Darwin's 

 ' Battle of Life ; ' we instinctively feel that each would live and find 



