82 
SCIENCE TEACHING IN ENGLAND. 
sense of probability. It may appeal to the emotional, but it 
gives no hold to the intellectual part of man to be told of an 
unending series of different organisms produced by instant 
but independent creation—organisms of, from the first, such 
evenly balanced hostility and power, such divers needs and 
capabilities, that the mere attempt to dwell on the details of 
their contemporaneous existence seems once more to reduce 
our mental Cosmos to primeval Chaos. We look in vain for 
the history of the ahimal or vegetable denizens of this earth, 
for their inter-relations, their mutual dependence, and their 
mutual destruction, for if food was in any way necessary to 
existence, destruction whether of animal or of vegetable life 
must have ensued. 
But many of us, would that I dared to say all of us, have 
read another account of Creation’s dawn, as given in the 
“ Origin of Species ” by, and with all reverence I say it, one 
who is as pre-eminent in the enunciation of the physical, as 
was Moses in the enunciation of the moral law. Charles 
Darwin has painted for us the missing history, the physical 
history of creation ; and, as the narrative of the Hebrew Law¬ 
giver derives its first mark of distinctiveness from the picture 
of the moral conflict between right and wrong involved in the 
history of the Fall of Man, so that of our nineteenth century 
Moses derives its reality by depicting to us the incessant struggle 
between strong and stronger, which is the accompaniment 
to our physical life. We know that the doctrine of a constant 
struggle for existence is true, for we know that the sum total 
of life is limited by the sum total of food, and that while the 
tendency of all life is to increase and multiply, the sum total 
of food supply remains more nearly constant. Hence it 
follows that the sum total of life must remain pretty constant 
too, other than with such changes as are brought about by 
the reduction of the food needs of any kind of organism, and 
that therefore the periodical increment of life must be in some 
wav or other reduced or rendered null. 
•/ 
We know, I say, that this struggle exists. Who has not 
seen the contest of the weeds for proprietorship of a piece 
of waste land, and the ultimate victory of the grasses, as 
endowed with the strongest vitality ? But if you want to feel 
the inevitable nature of the struggle, let us imagine the vast 
surrounding ocean of this globe containing but one single fish, 
and that a female herring, with just such a roe as that which, 
under the name of “ hard,” you have all, doubtless, often 
eaten, with its thousands of tiny eggs, each a potential 
herring. I do not know how many eggs a hening’s roe 
contains, but let us assume, if you will, 2,000. Of these 1,000, 
