Nature baffles us by methods so unlike our own. Man improves upon his
inventions, he makes them better and better and discards the old. The
first airplane flew a few miles with its pilot; now the airplane flies
hundreds of miles and carries tons of weight. Nature has progressed
steadily from lower to higher forms, but she keeps all her lower forms;
her first rude sketches are as precious to her as the perfected models.
There is no vacancy at the bottom of her series, as there is in the case
of man. I am aware that we falsify her methods in contrasting them with
those of man in any respect. She has no method in our sense of the term.
She is action, and not thought, growth and not construction, is internal
and not external. To try to explain her in terms of our own methods is
like trying to describe the sphere in terms of angles and right lines.
The origin of species is as dark a problem as is the origin of the
secondary rocks. What factors or forces entered into the production of
the vast variety of stratified rocks, differing as widely from the
original Adam rock, the granite, as the races of men differ from one
another? There is just as much room for natural selection to work in one
case as in the other. We find where two kinds of rock touch, one
overlying the other, and absolute difference in texture and color, and
no union between them. How account for their juxtaposition? Rock begat
rock, undoubtedly, and the aerial forces played the chief part, but the
origin of each kind is hidden in the abyss of geologic time, as is that
of the animal species.
The position of the camel with reference to the giraffe in Africa is
analogous to that, say, of the Catskill conglomerate to the laminated
sandstone that lies beneath it. They are kindred; one graduates into the
other. Whence the long neck and high withers of the giraffe? The need of
high feeding, say the selectionists, but other browsing animals must
have felt the same need. Our moose is strictly a browsing animal, and,
while his neck and shoulders are high, and his lips long, they do not
approach those of the giraffe. The ostrich has a long neck also, but it
is a low feeder, mainly from the ground.
We can only account for man and other higher forms of life surviving in
the highway of the physical forces on the ground that the wheels and
tramping hoofs missed them much oftener than they hit them. They learned
instinctively to avoid these destructive forces. Animal life was
developed amid these dangers. The physical forces go their way as
indifferent to life as is your automobile to the worms and beetles in
the road. Pain and suffering are nothing to the Eternal; the only thing
that concerns It is the survival of the fit, no matter how many fall or
are crushed by the way; to It men are as cheap as fleas; and they have
slaughtered one another in Europe of late without help or hindrance from
the Eternal, as do the tribes of hostile ants. The wars of the microbes
and the wars of men are all of a piece in the total scheme of things.
The survivors owe their power of survival to the forces that sought
their destruction; they are strong by what they have overcome; they
graduated in that school. Hence it is that we can say that evil is for
us as much as it is against us. Pain and suffering are guardian angels;
they teach us what to shun.
How puzzling and contradictory Nature often is! How impossible, for
instance, to reduce her use of horns to a single rule. In the deer and
elk tribe the antlers seem purely secondary sexual characteristics. They
are dropped as the season wanes; but the antelopes do not drop their
horns, and in Africa they are singularly ornamental. But with our
common sheep the horns are sexual manifestations; yet the old ram does
not shed his horns. Nature will not be consistent.
Back in geologic time we had a ruminant with four horns, two on the nose
and two on the crown, and they were real, permanent, bony growths.
What a powerful right fore limb Nature has given to the shovel-footed
mole, while the chipmunk, who also burrows in the ground, has no special
tool to aid him in building his mound of earth; he is compelled to use
his soft, tender little nose as a pusher. When the soil which his feet
have loosened has accumulated at the entrance to his hole, he shoves it
back with his nose.
Even to some of her thistles Nature is partial. The Canada thistle sows
its seeds upon the wind like the common native thistle; then in addition
it sends a big root underground parallel with its surface, and just
beyond the reach of the plough, which sends up shoots every six or seven
inches, so that, like some other noxious weeds, it carries on its
conquests like a powerful besieging army, both below ground and above.
A bachelor of laws in Michigan writes me in a rather peremptory manner,
demanding an answer by return mail as to why robins are evenly
distributed over the country instead of collected in large numbers in
one locality; and if they breed in the South; and he insists that my
answer be explicit, and not the mere statement "that it is natural
law." I wonder that he did not put a special-delivery stamp on his
letter. He is probably wondering why I am so dilatory in answering.
There seems to be an inherent tendency in nearly all living things to
scatter, to seek new fields. They are obeying the first command--to
increase and multiply. Then it is also a question of food, which is
limited in every locality. Robins do not breed in flocks, but in pairs.
Every gas is a vacuum to every other gas; and every locality is a vacuum
to the different species of birds that breed there. The seed-eaters, the
fruit-eaters, the insect-eaters, and the omnivorous feeders, like the
robin--in other words, the sparrows, the flycatchers, the warblers--may
and do all live together in harmony in the same narrow area.
The struggle of which we have heard so much since Darwin's time is
mainly a natural sifting and distributing process, such as that going on
all about us by the winds and the waters. The seeds carried by the winds
do not thrive unless they chance to fall on suitable ground. All may be
"fit" to survive and yet fail unless they are also lucky. What so frail
as a spider's web, and yet how the spiders thrive! Nature gives the weak
many advantages.
There is a slow, bloodless struggle of one species with another--the
fleet with the slow, the cunning with the stupid, the sharp-eyed and
sharp-eared with the dull of eye and ear, the keen of scent with the
blunt of scent--which we call natural competition; but the slow, the
stupid, the dull-eyed, dull-eared, and dull-scented find their place and
thrive for all that. They are dull and slow because they do not need to
be otherwise; the conditions of their lives do not require speed and
sharpness. The porcupine has its barbed quills, the skunk its pungent
secretion. All parts of nature dovetail together. The deer and the
antelope kind have speed and sharp senses because their enemies have
speed and sharp senses. The small birds are keen-eyed and watchful
because the hawks are so, too. The red squirrel dominates the gray
squirrel, which is above him in size and strength, and the chipmunk
below him, but he does not exterminate either. The chipmunk burrows in
the ground where the red cannot follow him, and he lays up a store of
nuts and seeds which the red does not. The weasel easily dominates the
rat, but the rat prospers in spite of cats and traps and weasels.
The sifting of species is done largely by environment, the wet, the
cold, the heat--the fittest, or those best adapted to their environment,
survive. For some obscure reason they have a fuller measure of life than
those who fall by the way.