Chap. IIL] STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE. 77 



expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the 

 Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is 

 sometimes equally convenient. We have seen that 

 man by selection can certainly produce great results, 

 and can adapt organic beings to his own uses, through 

 the accumulation of slight but useful variations, given 

 to him by the hand of Nature. But Natural Selection, 

 as we shall hereafter see, is a power incessantly ready 

 for action, and is as immeasurably superior to man's 

 feeble efforts, as the works of Nature are to those of 

 Art. 



We will now discuss in a little more detail the 

 struggle for existence. In my future work this subject 

 will be treated, as it well deserves, at greater length. 

 The elder De Candolle and Lyell have largely and 

 philosophically shown that all organic beings are 

 exposed to severe competition. In regard to plants, no 

 one has treated this subject with more spirit and ability 

 than W. Herbert, Dean of Manchester, evidently the 

 result of his great horticultural knowledge. Nothing is 

 easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal 

 struggle for life, or more dim cult— at least I have found 

 it so — than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind. 

 Yet unless it be thoroughly engrained in the mind, the 

 whole economy of nature, with every fact on dis- 

 tribution, rarity, abundance, extinction, and variation, 

 will be dimly seen or quite misunderstood. We behold 

 the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see 

 superabundance of food ; we do not see or we forget, that 

 the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live 

 on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying 

 life ; or we forget how largely these songsters, or their 

 eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and 



