THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 75 



valleys, go on the march they are followed by 

 birds and beasts of prey, which thin their ranks. 

 Moreover, the competition between species need 

 not be direct ; it will come to the same result 

 if both types seek after the same things. The 

 victory will be with the more effective and the 

 more prolific. 



In the same way we pass from the struggle of 

 similar seedlings in the over-crowded garden-plot 

 to the struggle of coarser with finer grasses after 

 a veldt-fire — in many cases apparently ending in 

 the survival of the coarsest. 



(c) Struggle with Fate. — Our sweep widens still 

 further, and we pass beyond the idea of competition 

 altogether, to cases where the struggle for existence 

 is between the living organism and the inanimate 

 conditions of its life — for instance, between birds 

 and the winter's cold, between aquatic animals 

 and changes in the water, between plants and 

 drought, between plants and frost — in a wide 

 sense, between Life and Fate.' 



The Struggle for Existence in the Plant 

 World. — We may be saved from taking a narrow 

 view of the struggle for existence if we emphasise 

 the fact that the concept must apply to plants 

 as much as to animals. " It has always pleased 

 me," Darwin said, " to exalt plants in the scale 

 of organised beings," and in his books " The 

 Power of Movement in Plants," " Climbing 



1 We cannot here pursue the suggestive idea that, besides struggle 

 between individuals, there is struggle between groups of individuals 

 — the latter most notably developed in mankind. Similarly, 

 working in the other direction, there is struggle between parts 

 or tissues in the body, between cells in the body, between equiva- 

 lent germ-cells, and, perhaps, as Weismann pictures, between the 

 various multiplicate items that make up our inheritance. 



