472 
BECAPITULATION. 
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, with the great majority 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 per¬ 
fection 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- 
