27a 
Is Nature Perfect ? 
[April, 
lands and the heaths. Indeed, how should it be otherwise ? 
Where there is superabundant plenty, where every demand 
is more than satisfied, how should there be the thrusting, 
and pushing, and jostling, outward visible signs of that in- 
ternecine war of each against all, and of all against each, 
which the “ friends of peace ” worship under the name of 
competition ? The observer cannot, indeed, forget that in 
his realms of concord and repose, pain and death are 
present. He knows that at any given moment hundreds of 
flies must be struggling in the snares of spiders ; that cater- 
pillars innumerable are being gradually devoured by internal 
parasites ; that many a song-bird is falling a prey to the 
hawk or the weasel. But, as was the case half a century 
ago even with eminent naturalists, he scarcely apprehends 
the full meaning of all this suffering and massacre. Such 
fadts as we have just enumerated seem to him mere “ rude 
exceptions to the general joy,” departures from the order of 
Nature, casual, even though numerous, rather than as they 
really are, part and parcel of its very essence. Our friend 
in his ramble, and in his necessarily hasty survey, fails to 
perceive that not only does one-half the animal kingdom 
live only in virtue of the death of the other half, but that 
the herbivorous creature is as much a life-destroyer as the 
beast of prey, extirpating other animals by depriving them 
of food, and plants by consuming their seed or their seed- 
lings. He overlooks the silent, quiet, but not the less 
deadly war waged by plants among themselves, each seeking 
to monopolise to itself soil, air, and light, and to crowd out, 
starve, or smother its competitors. In short, in his optimist 
contemplations, he entirely forgets that struggle for exist- 
ence which — whether or not we regard it as a main factor 
in the development of animal and vegetable forms — we are 
bound to accept as perhaps the greatest, and assuredly the 
saddest, feature of the organic world. Who, after reading 
the third chapter of the “ Origin of Species,” can fail to be 
reminded of those words of St. Paul “ For we know that 
the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together 
until now ;” * or of the sadder exclamation of one who, 
having no faith in the ultimate solution of this dark riddle, 
cries out in agony “ Creation is murder !” t 
But not only is strife rather than peace the order of the 
organic world, — strife so thoroughgoing and so widespread 
that it rages even among spermatozooids ; not only do the 
* Romans, viii. 22. 
f Winwood Reade, Martyrdom ot Man. 
