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CHAPTER III

THE STRUGGLE OF LIFE

1. Nature and Extent of the Struggle-2. Armour and Weapons3. Different Forms of Struggle -4. Cruelty of the Struggle

1. Nature and Extent of the Struggle.—If we realise what is meant by the "web of life," the recognition of the "struggle for existence" cannot be difficult. Animals do not live in isolation, neither do they always pursue paths of peace. Nature is not like a menagerie where beast is separated from beast by iron bars, neither is it a mêlée such as would result if the bars of all the cages were at once removed. It is not a continuous Waterloo, nor yet an amiable compromise between weaklings. The truth lies between these extremes. In most places where animals abound there is struggle. This may be silent and yet decisive, real without being very cruel, or it may be full of both noise and bloodshed.

This struggle is very old; it is older than the conflicts of men, older than the ravin of tooth and claw, it is as old as life. The struggle is often very keen-often for life or death. But though few animals escape experience of the battlefield—and for some there seems no discharge from this war-we must not misinterpret nature as "a continual free-fight." One naturalist says that all nature breathes a hymn of love, but he is an optimist under sunny southern skies; another compares nature to a huge gladiatorial show with a plethora of fighters, but he speaks as a pes

simist from amid the din of individualistic competition. Nature is full of struggle and fear, but the struggle is sometimes outdone by sacrifice, and the fear is sometimes cast out by love. We must be careful to remember Darwin's proviso that he used the phrase "struggle for existence" "in a large and metaphorical sense, including the dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny." He also acknowledged the importance of mutual aid, sociability, and sympathy among animals, though he did not carefully estimate the relative importance of competition on the one hand and sociability on the other. Discussing sympathy, Darwin wrote, “In however complex a manner this feeling may have originated, as it is one of high importance to all those animals which aid and defend one another, it will have been increased through natural selection; for those communities which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring." I should be sorry to misrepresent the opinions of any man, but after considerable study of modern Darwinian literature, I feel bound to join in the protest which others have raised against a tendency to narrow Darwin's conception of "the struggle for existence," by exaggerating the occurrence of internecine competitive struggle. Thus Huxley says, "Life was a continuous freefight, and beyond the limited and temporary relations of the family, the Hobbesian war of each against all was the normal state of existence." Against which Kropotkine maintains that this "view of nature has as little claim to be taken as a scientific deduction as the opposite view of Rousseau, who saw in nature but love, peace, and harmony destroyed by the accession of man." "Rousseau has

committed the error of excluding the beak-and-claw fight from his thoughts, and Huxley is committing the opposite error; but neither Rousseau's optimism nor Huxley's pessimism can be accepted as an impartial interpretation of nature."

2. Armour and Weapons.-If you doubt the reality

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of the struggle, take a survey of the different classes of animals. Everywhere they brandish weapons or are fortified with armour. "The world," Diderot said, "is the abode of the strong." Even some of the simplest animals have offensive threads, prophetic of the poisonous lassoes with which jellyfish and sea-anemones are equipped. Many worms have horny jaws; crustaceans have strong pincers; many insects have stings, not to speak of mouth organs like surgical instruments; spiders give poisonous bites; snails have burglars' files; the cuttlefish have strangling suckers and parrots' beaks. Among backboned animals we recall the teeth of the shark and the sword of the swordfish, the venomous fangs of serpents, the jaws of crocodiles, the beaks and talons of birds, the horns and hoofs and canines of mammals. Now we do not say that these and a hundred other weapons were from their first appearance weapons, indeed we know that most of them were not. But they are weapons now, and just as we would conclude that there was considerable struggle in a community where every man bore a revolver, we must draw a similar inference from the offensive equipment of animals.

As to armoured beasts, we remember that shells of lime or flint occur in many of the simplest animals, that most sponges are so rich in spicules that they are too gritty to be pleasant eating, that corals are polypes within shells of lime, that many worms live in tubes, that the members of the starfish class are in varying degrees lime-clad, that crustaceans and insects are emphatically armoured animals, and that the majority of molluscs live in shells. So among backboned animals, how thoroughly bucklered were the fishes of the old red sandstone against hardly less effective teeth, how the scales of modern fishes glitter, how securely the sturgeon swims with its coat of bony mail! Amphibians are mostly weaponless and armourless, but reptiles are scaly animals par excellence, and the tortoise, for instance, lives in an almost impregnable citadel. Birds soar above pursuit, and mammals are swift and strong, but among the latter the armadillos have bony shields of

porcupine have Now we do not

marvellous strength, and hedgehog and their hair hardened into spines and quills. say that all these structures were from the first of the nature of armour, indeed they admit of other explanations, but that they serve as armour now there can be no doubt. And just as we conclude that a man would not wear a chain shirt without due reason, so we argue from the prevalence of animal armour to the reality of struggle.

For a moment let me delay to explain the two savingclauses which I have inserted. The pincers of a crab are modified legs, the sting of a bee has probably the same origin, and it is likely that most weapons originally served some other than offensive purpose. We hear of spears becoming pruning-hooks; the reverse has sometimes been true alike of animals and of men. By sheer use a structure not originally a weapon became strong to slay; for there is a profound biological truth in the French proverb: “A force de forger on devient forgeron"

And again as to armour, it is, or was, well known that a boy's hand often smitten by the "tawse" became callous as to its epidermis. Now that callousness was not a device— providential or otherwise—to save the youth from the pains of chastisement, and yet it had that effect. By bearing blows one naturally and necessarily becomes thick-skinned. Moreover, the epidermic callousness referred to might be acquired by work or play altogether apart from school discipline, though it might also be the effect of the blows. In the same way many structures which are most useful as armour may be the "mechanical" or natural results of what they afterwards help to obviate, or they may arise quite apart from their future significance.

3. Different Forms of Struggle.—If you ask why animals do not live at peace, I answer, more Scottico, Why do not we? The desires of animals conflict with those of their neighbours, hence the struggle for bread and the competition for mates. Hunger and love solve the world's problems. Mouths have to be filled, but population tends locally and temporarily to outrun the means of subsistence, and the question "which mouths"

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FIG. 5.-Bird-catching spider (Mygale avicularia) attacking finches. (From Bates.)

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