62 
MICROSCOPICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY SECTION. 
December 2nd, 1867. 
A. G. Latham, Esq., in the Chair. 
Mr. Dancer sent for exhibition a Devolving Platform for 
the Microscope, similar to one shown by Mr. Hepworth some 
years ago at a meeting of the Section ; the one now exhi- 
bited has been patented in London. He also showed a 
Paper Slide Cabinet, invented by Mr. Piper, of London. 
“On Plants appearing in successive years on land prepared 
for Plantations, in Cheshire,” by H. A. Hurst, Esq., and 
George Carter, Esq, 
The struggle for existence between man and his fellow- 
man hourly going on in all populous countries has long been 
the theme of the historian, and forms the subject matter of 
the science of political economy. It is, however, but recently 
that Mr. Darwin, in his great work on the origin of species, 
has shown that this same struggle is proceeding with per- 
haps greater intensity in the animal and vegetable kingdom. 
With greater intensity because moral force, which mitigates 
the severity of the conflict among the human race, is, as 
far as we know, wanting in purely animal and vegetable 
organisms. Man would recoil from destroying an aged 
pauper merely because he was useless; but a tree must 
necessarily destroy most plants growing under its shade. 
It has no power to do otherwise. Still, the truth of this 
theory is only partially admitted and its full effect hardly 
ever realised even by scientific men. 
We attribute this, in a great measure, to the recent date of 
its promulgation and the comparatively few facts bearing on 
the subject which have been hitherto accumulated. Like 
Newton’s great ideas, it will be left to the future patient 
student of the facts of natural history to discover the many 
