of the European Starling, the Chinese Starling, and the English Sparrow. But each of these birds is already established in North America beyond recall. There is no regulation that I am aware of against the importation of Hamsters!

An ever recurring menace, I am confident, is involved in the efforts of sportsmen to bring into California alien game species. The Chinese or Ring-necked Pheasant and the Hungarian Partridge are instances of this purposeful transplantation of animals far beyond their naturally limiting barriers. The introduction, successfully from the standpoint of those who did it, of the Oriental carp ruined our native lowland fish fauna.

Let us set aside the economic phase of our problem at this point and return to the purely theoretical one. Inductions from observations such as I have last cited point toward a possible law, originally suggested to me by the mammalogist Seton, which may be stated as follows.

When a species native to a large area, such as a continental land mass, is introduced into a new smaller area (which, of course, must provide the ecologic niche appropriate for that species), then the species which is native in this smaller area, occupying the same ecologic niche, and with which the introduced species comes into competition, is soon supplanted. In other words, the invader from a large territory usually, if it becomes established at all, does so by competitively replacing a species native in the smaller area. A score of cases support this law, to one that illustrates a possibly opposite course of events. I can refer to numerous European vertebrates introduced into Australia and New Zealand, to Australian species introduced into New Zealand, and to Oriental and European (that is, Eurasian) species introduced into North America.

It looks to me as though the environment of large compass, where the long-time inhabitants have been subjected to the widest range in the rigors of existence, has developed species, through drastic processes of trial and discard, of the greatest degree of hardihood; and correlated with, or a phase

of, this hardihood is an innate aggressiveness as manifested by individuals as well as by whole populations.

The European House Sparrow, the European Starling, and the Chinese Mynah, endemically Eurasian birds, have been spreading since their introduction into North America at an amazing rate. Testimony overwhelmingly is to the effect that native American species of wild birds are giving way locally before these aliens. The ultimate result in a number of cases, as witnessed in Australia and New Zealand, is that the introduced species from the larger territory has crowded the native ones to the wall-led, in some cases, to their outright extinction. One is reminded of the process of displacement, now nearly complete, of the race Homo sapiens americanus, by the European Homo sapiens sapiens. The fate of a race is often sealed by the breaking down of the barrier that originally isolated it from a more adaptable or aggressive relative.

A visualization of the future, after this world-new process of barrier-bridging by man has been under way for a few centuries, is of a world with island faunas, and faunas of the lesser continents, wiped out, supplanted by sets of nicheoccupants, ecologic homologues, from the largest land mass; a world of relatively few species established widely over the earth's surface.

Lecture read October 31, 1927, under the auspices of the Graduate Division.

GOLDEN CUZCO

NINA MAY

"The Moon lives up at Cuzco" The swarthy runner told,

And all the roads to Cuzco

Were lit with dripping gold.

And all the walls of Cuzco
For centuries untold
When moonlight falls on Cuzco
Are lit with dripping gold.

And all the gates of Cuzco, Old as the Moon is old, Keep safe the wealth of Cuzco

With bars of beaten gold.

TOLSTOY*

GEORGE RAPALL NOYES

During his long life of eighty-two years, Count Leo Tolstoy became without dispute the most famous writer of his own time. His works were admired by the literary critics of every nation on the globe; and, what is more important, were read and loved by men and women, whether humble or distinguished, in every country where books are a part of daily life. His portrait, and the general type of his personality, became as well known as those of Lincoln and of Bismarck. Yet Tolstoy himself was a Russian noble, with the mental habits and prejudices of men of his own class; he passed nearly all his life in Russia; in his novels he wrote almost exclusively about Russians, and in his religious and ethical works he based his reasoning on observation of Russian conditions. On the one-hundredth anniversary of his birth, let us ask ourselves what were the causes of his universal fame, and whether that fame is likely to endure.

In the first place, Tolstoy described the life of ordinary men and women, of people like ourselves, with a truth not equaled by any other novelist. When we read War and Peace and Anna Karenin, we feel that the characters with whom Tolstoy makes us acquainted are just such people as our own brothers and sisters, as the people whom we encounter in social or business relations. Natasha Rostov, who lived in Moscow one hundred years ago, is the same sort of person as an American flapper of today. The stern farmer-novelist

* Address at a meeting in Wheeler Hall, University of California, September 11, 1928, in commemoration of the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Count Leo Tolstoy.

divines the most secret feelings of the young girl, and fully sympathizes with her joy in life, when he writes of her success at her first ball: "Natasha was at that pinnacle of happiness when a human being becomes completely good and kind, and does not believe in the possibility of evil, misfortune, and grief." In the same way the hopes, doubts, and despair of Anna Karenin, of her husband Karenin, of her lover Vronsky, are shared by every American who reads. their stories, though the reader may never have known a beautiful leader of high society, a statesman, or an officer in the Russian army. The costumes, the houses, the trimmings of their existence are Russian, but their real, their inner life is such as we know ourselves. They are not puppets on a gaudy stage; they are living men and women. Tolstoy consciously avoids what is eccentric or unusual; he illuminates our common inner life with the light of his genius.

Now one trait of any normal man or woman is a desire, whether conscious or unconscious, to lead a good life, a moral life. To be sure, there are other universal traits, such as sexual instincts, or the desire to make money and to gain influence in society. But we shall make no great mistake if we say that a man who has no desire to lead a moral life is a degenerate or a maniac, unworthy of much attention from a novelist. Meanwhile novelists of a certain school, though they never quite forget moral questions for that is impossible-prefer to spend their time analyzing greed or ambition, or, still more commonly, sexual instincts. Tolstoy, on the contrary, though he is quite aware that men are continually directed by greed or ambition or sexual instincts, and though he speaks much of such things, still always remembers, feels, reminds us that men are also trying to lead a moral life. This is a chief reason for the completeness and the charm of his pictures. The life of Vronsky is quite different from that of Karenin, but each man has a definite moral ideal, which sometimes yields to lust or hypocrisy, sometimes conquers them. And both Vronsky and Karenin are truly alive, alive for us in America as for their fellowcountrymen in Russia.