96 PHYSICAL BASIS OF CIVILIZATION 



influence of "religion, law, government, social and 

 family relations, industry, commerce, co-operation, 

 art, literature, education," etc., etc. What must 

 have been his character and conduct before any of 

 these agencies had even begun to modify it ? What 

 must it have been when the most miserable and 

 helpless brute of all was, by the use of clubs and 

 missiles, suddenly transformed into the most power- 

 ful? What fearful wholesale destruction of life 

 must have inevitably resulted therefrom? 



Against the above line of reasoning it may be ob- 

 jected that the struggle for existence naturally 

 divides into two specifically distinct sections, viz. : 

 the part acting against the inanimate environment 

 and the one against living antagonists; that the 

 former being the most severe and responsible for 

 the extermination of innumerable forms of life, 

 therefore the above argument must be condemned 

 as laying too much stress on the less important. 



To which it may be replied that success in the so- 

 called struggle against the inanimate environment 

 is not dependent upon the efforts of the living con- 

 testants, but upon the powers inherent in life and 

 in the resources and processes of nature. The infi- 

 nite possibility of new forms arising from variation, 

 the rapidity and copiousness of reproduction, the 

 survival of the fittest, such are the means by which 

 success in this so-called more important part of the 

 struggle for existence is gained. Inclemencies of 

 climate are resisted mainly by the growth of hide, 



