Ii 
THE MASTER INSTINCT 
ROM the naturalist’s point of view, the sole 
purpose of all forms of life in this world, man 
included, is to beget more life, and secure the per- 
petuity of the species. The master instinct in every 
living creature is to increase and multiply and fill 
the world with its progeny. Our dream that every 
living thing was made to serve some namable pur- 
pose apart from itself, or was designed in some way 
to serve man, is a notion that has survived from the 
childhood of the race. 
Many forms, in both the animal and the vegetable 
worlds, are the enemies of man and the enemies of 
one another. Other forms play into one another’s 
hands, but only to help forward the scheme of prop- 
agation of one or both sides, as when vines and trees 
incase their seeds in tempting fruit-pulps which the 
animals eat and thus drop the undigested germs far 
and near. All our fruits, from the apple down to the 
wild berries, are plotting to get their seeds scattered 
and planted, and they offer edible morsels as a wage 
to any creature that will perform this service. In 
many cases the wage is a very small one, as with the 
red cedar, the hardhack (Celtis), the sumac, the 
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