472 RECAPITULATION. Chap. XIV. 



species constantly trying to increase in number, with 

 natural selection always ready to adapt the slowly vary- 

 ing descendants of each to any unoccupied or ill-occu- 

 pied place in nature, these facts cease to be strange, or 

 perhaps might even have been anticipated. 



As natural selection acts by competition, it adapts 

 the inhabitants of each country only in relation to the 

 degree of perfection of their associates ; so that we 

 need feel no surprise at the inhabitants of any one 

 country, although on the ordinary view supposed to have 

 been specially created and adapted for that country, 

 being beaten and supplanted by the naturalised produc- 

 tions from another land. Nor ought we to marvel if all 

 the contrivances in nature be not, as far as we can 

 judge, absolutely perfect ; and if some of them be ab- 

 horrent to our ideas of fitness. We need not marvel at 

 the sting of the bee causing the bee's own death ; at 

 drones being produced in such vast numbers for one 

 single act, and being then slaughtered by their sterile 

 sisters ; at the astonishing waste of pollen by our fir- 

 trees ; at the instinctive hatred of the queen bee for her 

 own fertile daughters ; at ichneumonidae feeding within 

 the live bodies of caterpillars ; and at other such cases. 

 The wonder indeed is, on the theory of natural selection, 

 that more cases of the want of absolute perfection have 

 not been observed. 



The complex and little known laws governing varia- 

 tion are the same, as far as we can see, with the laws 

 which have governed the production of so-called specific 

 forms. In both cases physical conditions seem to have 

 produced but little direct effect ; yet when varieties 

 enter any zone, they occasionally assume some of the 

 characters of the species proper to that zone. In both 

 varieties and species, use and disuse seem to have pro- 

 duced some effect ; for it is difficult to resist this con- 



