1876.] Nature’s Scavengers. 177 
executing it in the most perfect manner. On the contrary, 
we find important matters overlooked, comparative trifles 
meeting with a superabundance of attention, and the best 
sanitary agents elbowed out of the field by imperfect workers 
who succeed in virtue of their very shortcomings. Such a 
state of things is obviously incompatible with the old theory 
which taught that the various species inhabiting any parti- 
cular country were especially adapted to its climate, soil, 
&c., and were, like the component parts of some exquisite 
machine, ordained each for the due discharge of some im- 
portant fundbion. But if, with the New School, we regard 
the Fauna and Flora of any country as consisting merely of 
such species as have hitherto been able to hold their ground 
in the struggle for existence, and who possibly, but quite 
incidentally, render to man— -or to the world at large — - 
benefits or injuries, all becomes clear and intelligible. 
Thus a candid consideration of Nature’s scavengers sup- 
plies us with valuable evidence in favour of the dodbrine of 
Evolution. 
There is yet another consideration We have seen that 
there are animal forms depending for subsistence upon dead 
matter in every possible stage, from the scarcely cold car- 
case, or the fruit just fallen from its spray, on to debris in 
which scarcely any trace of organised strudbure can be 
recognised. Without such matter these animals, with their 
present habits and as now constituted, could not exist. 
The Necrophorus, as we now find him, implies small dead 
vertebrate animals, or possibly Mollusca ; the Dynastidas 
prove the existence of decaying trees, and the Geotrupidae 
that of large herbivorous Mammalia. Supposing, therefore, 
that every animal has some especial and unalterable func- 
tion for which its strudbure is a necessary adaptation, the 
scavengers of Nature cannot have made their appearance 
on the scene until those animal or vegetable species whose 
remains or excretions they were ordained to remove had 
been for some time in existence.* The carrion-feeders 
would have been in evil plight if created before the animal 
population of the world had become numerous, and deaths 
consequently were frequent. Hence, on the same supposi- 
tion of special creation and of permanence of fundbion, 
many of the higher animals must not have succeeded, but 
have preceded in their origin a multitude of lower 
* Except we adopt the grotesque hypothesis that the earth at its creation 
was stocked with decayed wood, leaf->mould, decomposing dung of sorts, and 
the bodies of dead animals — a supposition for which precedent could be found 
even at the present day. 
VOL. VI. (N.S.) V 
